Mengpei Gao — The Language Gap in Queensland Injury Claims

How did you start down this career path?

I didn’t set out to be a lawyer, because law wasn’t something I knew to want.

I grew up in a small town in China, mostly left to work things out for myself. I sat the national university entrance exam, the hurdle that decides where you go and your future after, and it didn’t go my way. Languages were what I was good at, so languages were what I studied, and translation was the future everyone assumed for a student like me.

Then, while I was planning to study overseas, Bond University came to my campus in China to promote its programs. It was an evening session, as it happened. They showed us their law school and their mooting: students on their feet, building an argument, taking it apart. I remember the feeling precisely. It wasn’t ambition. It was recognition: this is something I would be good at. Law had never crossed my mind before that evening, for the simple reason that it wasn’t something people like me had access to, so it wasn’t something people like me considered.

I think about that moment often, because it is exactly what I now watch happen to my clients, in reverse. A right you don’t know exists might as well not exist.

So Queensland found me before I ever found Queensland. I told my father I would see it through, came over as an international student, and studied law at Bond in a language I was still learning, inside a system I had never encountered. There were points in that stretch where I came close to giving up. But nonetheless, I graduated with honours and was admitted in 2015, a slow yet contradictorily fast two years and eight months after I landed.

Personal injury found me during my student placements. I tried several areas of practice, and in most of them the client was a company, a contract, a file. In personal injury, the client was a person whose life had just been interrupted — and I noticed I could often tell what they were actually worried about before they had finished saying it, because I had been the outsider inside an unfamiliar system myself.

What inspires you in your role/industry? Why?

I’d frame it as a problem rather than an inspiration, because that’s how it actually sits with me.

Nationally, the occupations with the highest rate of serious injury claims are labourers, community and personal service workers, and machinery operators and drivers. That is Safe Work Australia’s Key Work Health and Safety Statistics 2025 release, measured against hours worked. Those are the farm, meat-processing, construction, cleaning and hospitality jobs, and they are often the jobs that newer arrivals and people on temporary visas end up in.

So the exposure to injury and the capacity to do something about it run in opposite directions. The people most likely to be injured are the people least equipped to run a claim in a second language, inside a system nobody has ever explained to them. A great many never come forward at all, simply because they don’t know the law covers them, and that is just as true after a road accident, or an injury in a public place. The rules change; the silence doesn’t.

I can see that gap clearly because I’ve stood on the wrong side of it. When you arrive somewhere as an outsider, in a language that isn’t your first, inside systems that were never built with you in mind, you learn how much work it takes just to establish what you’re entitled to, before you can even begin to act on it. That isn’t inspiration. It’s a structural problem with a legal solution, which is a fortunate thing for a lawyer to have found.

Ascent Lawyers is what I built to work on it.

What’s your approach to customer service that separates you from the rest?

I’d rather answer what we insist on than what sets us apart, because the second question isn’t mine to answer.

The first thing we insist on is that the client leaves the room understanding their own case. For most of our clients, the whole matter — from the first phone call to the final advice — happens in the language they actually think in: Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese or English. The same lawyer who reads the medical evidence answers the client’s questions, directly, with nothing lost in between. The point was never which language the work happens in. It’s whether the understanding actually arrives.

The second thing is being honest before being reassuring. It’s easy to tell a worried person what they want to hear, but it’s a disservice. The job is to give someone an accurate picture of where they stand, including the parts they won’t enjoy, so they can make their own decisions without false hope. In practice, that means plain language, being upfront about how costs work rather than leaving people guessing, and saying plainly when something isn’t simple.

I’ve also watched clients with flawless English feel like strangers in a process that treats them as a file number. Language is a large part of the gap but it isn’t the whole of it.

How do you innovate and stay ahead of industry trends?

If your answer to a structural problem is one lawyer working very hard, you don’t have an answer. You have a bottleneck.

So most of what we’ve built isn’t about chasing the latest thing. It’s about making sure the quality of a client’s experience doesn’t depend on who picked up their file, or on whether that person is having a difficult week. In practice, that means a defined process with set checkpoints so nothing slips, and a senior lawyer reviewing the significant stages of every matter.

It also means owning what sits underneath. We kept hitting the limits of off-the-shelf practice software: too many problems it simply couldn’t solve for the way we actually work. So we are building our own internal application, shaped around how our matters really run. AI sits inside it at specific steps, turning voluminous records into working chronologies and first drafts. The lawyer remains responsible for every piece of work that carries their name; AI doesn’t change who answers for the file, only how quickly a good lawyer can get there.

And it means building the team the problem actually requires: lawyers who can hold the conversation directly and do the legal work properly. Language capability is not a substitute for legal skill, and legal skill delivered in a language the client doesn’t follow isn’t much use either. You need both in the same person, and you rarely find that ready-made. You develop it, which is why we run an internship program, and why supervision and review aren’t bureaucracy here; they’re how the next lawyer gets better. When I learn something worth keeping, I fold it back into how the whole team works rather than keeping it to myself.

What is the toughest challenge you’ve faced in your role? How did you overcome it?

The hardest part of this work isn’t the law. It’s that a large share of the difficulty our clients face is cultural, and none of it is written down anywhere they would find it.

If you’ve grown up being taught that complaining is impolite, you tend to tell the doctor you’re managing fine when you aren’t, and to play the pain down. And the medical record, which can only reflect what a doctor is actually told, is a very large part of what any injury claim turns on. Or you assume that being patient and cooperative is what gets you looked after, so you don’t ask why something has stalled, and you don’t query an assessment that doesn’t match how you actually feel.

Neither instinct is a character flaw. They’re just what people were taught growing up. Explaining it early — that the record only helps if it reflects the truth of how you actually are — is a real part of the job, and it can’t wait until something happens three weeks in.

The rest is making sure our client is understood and taken seriously in the process. That means explaining how the Australian system actually works, so nobody is making decisions blind. And it means dealing with the other side professionally and cooperatively, which, in my experience, is what gets a client properly listened to.

What are some of your goals for the next 5 years?

Three things.

First, keep closing the gap I’ve described, so that fewer people go through an injury without knowing the law has something to say about it.

Second, keep sharpening what sits underneath the practice, so our lawyers spend their energy on judgement, strategy and the person in front of them, rather than on administration.

Third, keep building the team that makes the first two possible: lawyers who can do this work properly, in the language it needs to happen in, with room to grow into it.

I still hope most people never need us. The work is making sure that when someone does, not knowing the law is no longer part of the injury.

About Ascent Lawyers

Ascent Lawyers (逸升法律) is a personal injury law firm in Brisbane, founded in 2018 by Mengpei Gao. It practises exclusively in personal injury and compensation law: CTP (car accident) claims, WorkCover (workplace injury) claims and public liability claims across Queensland, and Total and Permanent Disability (TPD) claims Australia-wide.

The firm advises clients in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese.