Meet the lawyers behind the highly qualified work visa

Marco Satala is an H-1B superstar. He filed 9,338 new visa applications during the last fiscal year, or about an hour if he worked every hour.

This makes him one of the 100 most prolific lawyers in the country. But he is not even close to the top producer of visa applications for highly skilled foreign workers. This lawyer has filed six times more applications than Satala.

Together, the top 100 lawyers filed 262,000 new H-1B visa applications, nearly half of all applications filed during the 2018 fiscal year, according to Ministry of Labor data. It's been a big business for years, with teams of lawyers gathering thousands of documents for technology giants such as Cisco, Google and Qualcomm, for outsourcing companies and even financial companies such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.

"It takes a whole operational staff to get there," Satala said.

Data from the Labor Department opens a window on the great legal specialty of H-1B visa applications. Some 6,900 lawyers in offices from coast to coast filed 555,000 applications from companies interested in hiring software developers, scientists, accountants, and more. With a few exceptions, they compete for the 85,000 H-1B visas each year for a randomized computer lottery that begins in April. In the face of changing immigration rules and increased monitoring of H-1B visas by the Trump administration, lawyers who know the system are in high demand.

At Pearl Law Group, to which Satala joined at the end of last year, the entire application team receives matching t-shirts. He is a big fan of this year's shirt, his first.

"We have the Statue of Liberty with the poem written there to remind us at the end of the day what we are trying to do," he said. "It brings together an office like no other project."

The H-1B has become a hot spot of the debate on immigration and a target of the Trump administration. Companies, including tech companies that have lobbied for more H-1B visas, claim that hiring highly skilled foreign workers is the only way to fill the skills gap that would otherwise hinder growth. Critics say that outsourcing companies and other companies are using visas to hire cheaper foreign workers at the expense of American workers.

Melanie Bradshaw of EY Law, an international firm affiliated with the consulting firm Ernst and Young, is the country's most prolific advocate in the H-1B field. It submitted 57,411 new applications to the Labor Department. It's pretty much an app for every 9 minutes if she's been working non-stop for a year.

Although each application is signed by only one lawyer, teams of Paralegals, specialists and other lawyers generally work on the preparation of documents submitted to the Labor Department.

Lawyers begin preparing their applications in October. The application form is simple, but they must also establish a job description, a letter of support from the prospective employer and even a college transcript, generating hundreds of pages of documents to be printed and placed in envelopes. . According to the lawyers, a typical application takes between three and five hours. No lawyer interviewed was willing to discuss their fees.

Once a request is submitted, the labor department checks it for completeness and then certifies it. The documents are then transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, which determines if the position meets the high skill requirements for an H-1B position and if the employee has a level of training and equivalent experience prior to Approval of a visa.

Some applications are rejected. In other cases, companies abandon the process and never adopt a visa for Homeland Security. But every year, the number of applications certified by the federal government far exceeds the number of visas available, which requires the lottery to determine who will get the valuable documents.

Satala's claims for fiscal 2018 were filed while he was at Fragomen, which counts among its customers Apple, Uber, Qualcomm Technologies, based in San Diego, the HCL America computer contractor and non-technology companies like Walmart and Bank of America.

Fragomen had more lawyers among the top 100 H-1B candidates last year than any other company. Thirty-two of the hundred most prolific H-1B law attorneys worked for Fragomen at the time of filings, according to an analysis by this news organization of the firm's information pages from the LinkedIn Department of Labor and Accounts. LinkedIn accounts. And these 32 lawyers filed about one-fifth of all new worker applications filed last year.

Cynthia Lange, managing partner at Fragomen, which has offices in San Francisco and Santa Clara, said the firm was one of the top and foremost specialists in corporate immigration law. Three decades ago, when Lange began his career in the government's immigration services, Fragomen was a big name.

"I remember that the government members I worked with said they read Fragomen's books to better understand immigration," she said.

When it comes to filing thousands of applications in a short time, software plays a key role. Berry, Appleman & Leiden, with offices in San Francisco and Walnut Creek, had eight of the top one hundred lawyers, second only to Fragomen. These eight lawyers have filed approximately 10,100 H-1B applications for clients such as Facebook, Amazon and Expedia.

Last month, Berry, Appleman & Leiden announced their intention to start using an artificial intelligence "process automation" platform to reduce repetitive tasks so that the company can "Focus on higher value-added, more customer-centric interactions".

"All good law firms in the United States, as well as all good companies, would automate as many processes as possible," said David Berry, the firm's founding partner. However, he added, "the level of control requires individual and careful attention in each case, which is why we have a thousand employees and not just computers."

Berry has estimated that a simple request can take up to three hours, while a complicated request can take up to 40 hours. Some applications even require the law firm to use external experts to explain why a candidate is qualified for a visa or why a type of work requires a highly skilled and highly qualified worker, he said.

The time required was increased under President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, which resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of H-1B refusals and requests for additional evidence regarding potential employees and their qualifications before granting a visa, said Berry.

"The whole process that reliably took several weeks, when it was processed at its fastest pace, now takes months," Berry said.