Attorneys Aren't Omnipotent! A Must-Know for NIW/EB1 Applicants

Have you signed an immigration attorney and think you can just relax now? My tearful experience says, NO! The hourly rate for immigration attorneys in the U.S. ranges from $150 to $500. Will an attorney spend 10 hours on your case? Moreover, 10 hours is far from enough to prepare a NIW/EB1 application. In the process of your green card application, the role of the law firm is more about organizing the Summary of Contributions you provide into an application material that meets the requirements of the immigration office (commonly known as fitting a template). Your active participation is the key factor in determining the success or failure of the application.

1. Prepare the Summary of Contributions (SoC) diligently. It’s difficult to cook without rice. The attorney needs a detailed SoC to extract enough supporting evidence to support the claims in your NIW/EB1 Petition Letter. You need to collect and dig out various evidence as much as possible based on the reference materials provided by the attorney. Do not think that small pieces of evidence are meaningless. When these pieces are compiled together, they can provide strong support for your claim. Collecting evidence is time-consuming and laborious (it took me 7 months to mail out my EB1A), and digging out evidence requires various experiences and data sources (e.g., rankings, top citation info, etc.). However, the more evidence you have, the greater the likelihood your case will be successful. The time spent on SoC is worthwhile. To address the pain point of preparing SoC being time-consuming and laborious, we also launched the SoCKit solution. Its template will guide you to organize various evidence, what you think of and what you don’t. At the same time, it can also do citation analysis and automatically generate various evidence (citation map, highly cited papers, notable citations, etc.), helping you to quickly prepare the SoC so that you can submit the green card application 1 to 6 months in advance. Some law firms use not requiring clients to provide SoC as a selling point, which, in my opinion, may not be a good thing. Although these law firms will also ask you to provide various materials, attorneys cannot understand your case like you do. It's more reliable to do it yourself.
2. Diligently revise the Petition Letter (PL) drafted by the attorney. After you send the SoC to the attorney, the law firm will prepare your PL based on the SoC. When you receive the draft PL from the law firm, be sure to revise it carefully. First, the attorney is not an expert in your field, and many descriptions may be wrong. Second, the attorney’s PL is mostly templated, which may not suit your case. Lastly, there may be misunderstandings about your SoC by the attorney, not highlighting the key points or missing your highlights. Therefore, you still need to be diligent and treat it as seriously as revising a paper. Previously, my EB1A, the attorney pasted someone else's notable citations in my PL... It was a real shock. The first time I submitted EB1A, I didn’t revise the PL and just submitted it as the attorney wrote it, and it ended in tragedy. Later, when I resubmitted, I took charge and made major revisions, and finally, it was successfully approved. Looking back at the PL I revised compared to the one provided by the attorney, it was basically rewritten by more than 50%.

Therefore, those who have signed with a law firm must diligently prepare the SoC and revise the PL. This is the key to application success! Without a good SoC, even the best attorney can't make miracles!