This paper examines social encounters in which ‘social mediators’ (SM) aid migrants to obtain social, legal and healthcare services in France. One recurrent activity in this context is the comprehension and ensuing account of procedures for handling administrative paperwork, acquiring civil or legal rights, etc. The assay specifically centers on participation organisation and on the use of the users’ documents, which become the object of close scrutiny. It displays that grasping the documents’ content and the procedure, and accounting them to the user is an intricate and multiparty enterprise. The methodological framework covers conversation analysis and multimodal interaction inquiry to examine the data, drawn from a corpus of video-recorded meetings in a French social centre.