Have you hired an immigration attorney and think you can now relax? My experience says otherwise! In the U.S., immigration attorneys charge between $100 and $1000 per hour. Will an attorney spend 10 hours on your case? Ten hours is insufficient for preparing a NIW/EB1 application. The law firm's role in your green card application is primarily to organize the Summary of Contributions (SoC) you provide into an application that meets immigration office requirements. Your active involvement is crucial for the success of your application.
Prepare the SoC carefully. An attorney needs a detailed SoC to gather enough supporting evidence for your NIW/EB1 Petition Letter. Collect as much evidence as possible, based on the attorney's reference materials. Even small pieces of evidence can significantly support your claim when combined. Gathering evidence is time-consuming and labor-intensive; it took me seven months to mail out my EB1A. However, the more evidence you collect, the higher your chances of success. The time spent on the SoC is worthwhile. To ease the burden, we launched the SoCKit solution, which guides you in organizing various evidence and performs citation analysis, helping you prepare the SoC quickly and potentially submit your green card application 1 to 6 months earlier. Some law firms claim that clients don't need to provide a SoC, but I believe this is not beneficial. Attorneys cannot understand your case as well as you do, so it's more reliable to do it yourself.
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. Carefully review and revise the draft PL you receive. Attorneys are not experts in your field, so some descriptions may be incorrect, and their templated PL might not suit your case. Misunderstandings about your SoC could lead to key points being missed. Treat this revision process as seriously as revising a paper. In my case, the attorney mistakenly included someone else's notable citations in my PL. The first time , one of my friends submitted EB1A, he didn't revise the PL and it was rejected. When he resubmitted, he made major revisions and it was successfully approved. The revised PL differed from the attorney's version by over 50%.
Therefore, if you have hired a law firm, diligently prepare the SoC and revise the PL. This is key to application success. Without a good SoC, even the best attorney can't work miracles!
