Environmental Company VP’s L-1 Extension Approved After Roadbumps

Year: 2018
Nationality: Chinese
Beneficiary: Ms. Wen
Company Industry: Environmental protection company
China Company: Established in 2009, 60 employees
US company: founded in California in March 2016, currently 7 employees
Beneficiary Position: Vice President of China Company, General Manager of US Company

BACKGROUND
• The small number of clients in the United States makes it difficult to demonstrate that Ms. Wen has helped the company grow as an executive in the past year.
• The small number of employees at the U.S. company made it difficult to demonstrate Ms. Winn’s job responsibilities as a manager in terms of execution and management.
•  Unclear positioning of the position and difficulty in substantiating the role Ms. Wen plays for Chinese and U.S. companies.


• The extension application has already been denied once by the USCIS.

• Ms. Wen consulted several attorneys, all of whom previously considered her application too poor and refused to take it on.

Ms. Wen’s Chinese parent company established its first overseas subsidiary in the U.S. in 2016 and applied for an L-1 visa for her in 2017, reassigning her to the U.S. to serve as the company’s general manager and continue to expand its overseas operations. Due to various unpredictable factors, the first year of operation of the U.S. company did not go smoothly. When it came time to apply for the L-1 extension, Ms. Wen’s original attorney did not make a plan for her special situation, but sent the documents after collecting some basic data in a formulaic manner, resulting in her first extension application being rejected directly. Undeterred, Ms. Wen consulted several attorneys, all of whom refused to take on her case because of its immaturity. After a discussion and analysis, she referred her case to Tsang & Associates, hoping that we could help her get a smooth extension.

After analyzing Ms. Wen’s case, Mr. Zang believed that the situation was indeed not optimistic, but for challenging and difficult cases, we were willing to invest time and energy to overcome the challenges. Because Ms. Wen was able to provide so little data, the USCIS quickly sent a Notice of Filing (RFE) after re-filing the L-1 extension petition. The Tsang & Associates team responded quickly to the retroactive filing and was able to turn the situation around for her.

KEYS TO SUCCESS
1. Demonstrate executive capability
a. We took the time to understand how Ms. Wynne’s company designs, manufactures, delivers and sells its products. Spending nearly 15 pages of the attorney’s letter creating seven workflow diagrams that explain in detail how Ms. Wen oversees the various business operations throughout the company through her department heads.
b. We also demonstrated the ability of each of her employees to perform all basic operational tasks by submitting documentation such as work reports, thus allowing Ms. Winn to focus on performing executive duties rather than day-to-day minutiae.
c. In the U.S. company’s business plan, we further emphasized that Ms. Wen’s job description matched her executive position, for example, by providing photos of her representing the company at top industry trade shows so that the immigration officer would know that she was building business partnerships with other company executives in the same industry and had the commitment to continue to grow the company.

2. Make full use of the replacement notice
Because of the many weaknesses in Ms. Wen’s case, it was not unexpected that she received a notice of replacement.The right strategy for responding to a replacement notice is the key to turning a case into a win.

In the supplemental notice, we were able to clearly understand what the immigration officer really cared about. After an in-depth discussion with Ms. Wen, Mr. Zang quickly identified the focus and direction of the supplemental documents. The team wrote a nearly 40-page letter responding to each point raised by the immigration officer, and argued that Ms. Wen had met every criterion for the L-1 extension. Oftentimes, clients are afraid of receiving a retroactive notice, believing it to be a sign of failure. However, a good legal team can turn a retroactive notice to their advantage. Only by fully understanding the immigration officer’s “tastes” can we serve the right “dish” at the right time.

3. Guiding guests to improve supporting materials
The biggest reason why Ms. Wen’s case was identified by other attorneys as having poor conditions and low success rate was that she had very limited supporting documents to provide. In response, the Tsang & Associates team provided her with a detailed list of documents to help her fill in the gaps and make up for the deficiencies in her existing documents. For example, with Ms. Wen’s guidance, Ms. Zang quickly applied for a sales license for her company’s products, convincing the immigration officer that she was planning her company’s future growth as an executive step by step.

OUTCOME
After thorough preparation, Tsang & Associates submitted the supplemental documents in December 2018 and received the approval notice from the USCIS 2 weeks later, which is valid for up to 2 years. Ms. Wen was thrilled to receive the good news! Since her first denial of the L-1 extension, she has been working hard on this matter. She was discouraged by her attorney’s refusal to accept her case, and her company encountered many difficulties because her visa could not be renewed. Ms. Wen is grateful to Tsang & Associates for their professional legal services in this case. She was deeply impressed by the hard-won approval notice and repeatedly said that she would continue to work with us for her next legal counseling services and EB-1C green card processing.

Lawyer Joseph Tsang commented:
At this stage, visa review has been tightened across the board and the standards for L-1 visa approval have been raised. The requirements for L-1 visas are complex, and each applicant has different conditions and company size, so it is advisable to consult with an attorney before applying. Tsang & Associates has handled numerous L-1 cases, and we are good at analyzing each case according to the client’s situation and creating a customized application plan for you.


*To protect customer privacy, customer names are pseudonyms.