Your Intake VA and Your USCIS-Certified Translations. One Team. One Invoice.

Every immigration firm in America solves the same two problems with two different vendors: bilingual client intake and USCIS-certified translation. Taika is the only company that solves both from one team.

Your bilingual legal assistant runs intake and case coordination in your clients’ language; the same certified-translation company since 2009 (102,000+ projects, 300+ languages, 5.0★) produces the USCIS- and court-accepted translations your filings need — no hand-off, no second vendor, no dropped deadline.

Get a free quote, or see how the translation-integrated VA model works.

In immigration, the document chase is the work

Every immigration filing is a package of civil documents that mostly do not exist in English and mostly are not in the client’s hands yet. Birth certificates, marriage certificates, divorce decrees, police records, academic documents, financial evidence — each has to be obtained, translated, certified, indexed, and matched to a form.

That is where cases stall, and it is almost never for a legal reason. It stalls because nobody has time to make the fourth call about the missing police certificate from a country eight time zones away, in a language the front desk does not speak.

A bilingual assistant in this role owns exactly that:

• Document collection and tracking — a live checklist per matter, with what is outstanding visible at a glance.
• Client calls in the client’s language — chasing what is missing, explaining what a document must show, confirming what has arrived.
• Exhibit assembly and indexing — the package built the way your firm builds it, ready for attorney review.
• Calendaring notices — biometrics, interviews, RFE deadlines, entered the day the notice arrives.
• Case status monitoring — and flagging anything that has gone quiet longer than it should.
• Approved status updates — so clients stop calling for reassurance, which is most of what those calls are.
• G-28s and cover letters from your templates — drafted so an attorney edits rather than starts.

The boundary, and why it is stricter here

An assistant relays facts the attorney has approved. Everything else escalates.

Immigration is the field where unauthorized practice does the most damage and is most actively policed — the notario problem is a real and well-documented harm, and clients arriving at your firm may have been burned by it already. A client asking whether they qualify for something, whether it is safe to travel, or what a notice means gets an attorney callback, logged and routed. Never an answer from the assistant.

Most state rules of professional conduct, modelled on ABA Model Rules 5.3 and 5.5, make the supervising attorney responsible for non-lawyer assistants regardless of whether they are employees, contractors, or a service. That duty is yours and it is not delegable. What a well-run role gives you is a written escalation list, so the boundary is a rule rather than a judgement call.

The certified-translation half, under the same roof

Under 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3), every foreign-language document submitted to USCIS needs a complete English translation accompanied by the translator’s certification of accuracy and competence. Partial translations and missing certifications are two of the most common avoidable defects in an otherwise clean filing.

Because this role sits inside a certified translation company, the assistant who chases the document and the team that certifies its translation are the same vendor. That removes the handoff where files usually sit for a week, and it fixes a second problem most firms live with:

Name spellings. A birth certificate transliterated in 1994 and a passport issued in 2021 can legitimately disagree, and to an adjudicator with no context that reads as a discrepancy. The assistant captures the spelling used on the primary identity document at intake; the translation team renders each document as it stands and flags every variant explicitly rather than silently normalising it. Reconciled at intake, this costs nothing. Discovered in an RFE, it costs months.

See immigration document translation for the full document set and how packages are typically assembled.

Confidentiality, at immigration sensitivity

Matter-level access under named credentials you issue. An NDA on request. No client material in personal email or consumer messaging. Same-day access removal when a role changes. And nothing distributed through an open marketplace of unvetted freelancers — immigration files are precisely the material that should never travel that way.

What to hand over first

The document checklist and the chase calls. That is the highest-volume, most language-dependent, most delegable work in the practice, and it is where a bilingual assistant is felt in the first week. Calendaring notices comes with it, because it is the failure mode with the worst consequences.

Exhibit assembly and template drafting come next, once the assistant knows your forms and the escalation list is written down.

Get a free quote, or see the general legal virtual assistant role and all virtual assistant services.

This page describes how the role is generally structured and is not legal advice. Your own state bar’s rules govern supervision and the scope of non-lawyer assistance.