Full Legal Services for Expats in Costa Rica — In English

What "handled in English" actually means

Every filing, hearing and official document in Costa Rica happens in Spanish. No firm can change that, and any that implies otherwise is selling you something. What we do is make sure you are never the one bridging the gap: you deal with us in English, we conduct the matter in Spanish, and nothing material reaches you as a document you cannot read. The place this matters most is not the big moments but the small ones — a request from a registry, a short deadline, a clause that means something different than its literal translation suggests.

What can be done remotely, and what cannot

More than most people expect. Company formation, most property transactions, many filings and the great majority of correspondence can proceed while you are abroad. What generally requires presence — yours or that of someone properly empowered to act for you — are acts before a notary and certain appearances. The realistic answer for a given matter depends on which acts it contains, so we map that at the start and tell you plainly whether a trip is necessary, rather than discovering it at the point of signature.

The power of attorney: the instrument that makes distance work

A power of attorney is what allows someone here to act for you while you are not in the country, and its drafting matters far more than its signing. A power written too narrowly fails at exactly the wrong moment — at closing, with a seller waiting. One written too broadly hands over authority you did not intend to give. If it is signed outside Costa Rica it generally needs an apostille and an official translation before it can be used here. We draft powers for the specific transaction and tell you in advance exactly what must be apostilled and in what order.

Documents arriving from the United States or Canada

Birth and marriage certificates, corporate resolutions, court orders and powers of attorney all follow the same path: they must be apostilled in the country that issued them — not here — and officially translated into Spanish. The sequence is where things go wrong. A document that arrives without an apostille usually has to make the trip back, which is why we send clients a written list of exactly what to obtain before anything is couriered.

Fees and how we bill a client abroad

We quote the scope in writing before starting, in terms you can compare against what you are used to at home, and we tell you where third-party costs — registry fees, official translations, notarial charges — sit outside our fee rather than folding them in invisibly. Clients abroad can be invoiced and can pay without being in the country. If a matter is likely to grow beyond its initial scope, we would rather say so at the outset than present it as a surprise later.

We do not advise on your home country's law

We are Costa Rican lawyers and we practise Costa Rican law. Where a matter has a foreign dimension — tax residency, a will made abroad, a judgment from another country, a cross-border family issue — we work alongside your counsel at home rather than guessing at their side of it. In our experience the expensive failures for expatriates rarely happen inside one jurisdiction: they happen in the seam between two, where each adviser assumed the other had it covered.