I have successfully received the approval notice for US green card under EB2NIW category in 2023. I am a working professional with no research experience (not a researcher at all, no papers, no citations), and hold masters (no PhD) along with professional designations.
It’s Impossible to Assess Reliability in Short Interactions
Think of the least reliable person among your friends or classmates. It likely took months, maybe even years, of interaction to truly understand how unreliable they were and what specific behaviors revealed that. Now, consider how limited your interactions with a law firm or agency are during an initial consultation.
Even if a law firm seems professional, each attorney in the firm is different. There’s simply no way to accurately gauge their reliability in such a short time. By the time I spend enough energy conducting thorough due diligence on a attorney or firm, I could have already collected most of the necessary documents and written a rough draft of my application.
Any Immigration Attorney Can’t Save Me Time on Supporting Documents
Even the most capable attorney will require me to provide all supporting documents, as no third party can do this for me.
If I hire a "responsible" attorney, they’ll inevitably ask me to revise my proposed endeavor and supporting arguments multiple times. They don’t know my background or industry as well as I do, meaning I’ll have to spend additional time explaining my experience and context.
For instance, a paragraph I could draft and refine in 10 minutes (with tools like ChatGPT) might require a 30-minute phone call or email exchange with a lawyer. Multiply that across the entire process, and a statement I could write in one month could easily stretch to three or five months with external involvement.
Immigration Attorneys Rarely Handled Non-Academic Cases
Most attorneys focus on academic cases, leaving them with little to no expertise in handling applications like mine, which require digging into professional achievements. My previous notes about the 20+ attorneys who declined to take my case clearly demonstrate this—they had no idea how to approach my type of application.
Thus, any "expertise" these attorneys claim to have is largely irrelevant for applicants like me. Their standardized approach simply doesn’t fit.
My Daily Work is Key, Attorneys Simply Don’t Have Access to Dig Deep.
Many of my supporting materials come from insights I gain while working. No attorney, no matter how responsible, will shadow me at work for weeks to gather those details. Even if they were willing to, my employer would never allow it.
Because these moments of inspiration occur while I’m actively engaged in my job, I’m the only person who can record and articulate them. Lawyers cannot contribute meaningfully to this process.
Conclusion: It’s Inefficient No Matter What
Whether the lawyer is responsible or not, whether they charge more or less, hiring someone else to manage my NIW application is simply not worth it. For me, I’d rather take control of the process myself.