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FAQ: Business Immigration Legal Fees, Frequently Asked Questions
Introduction to This PageThis FAQ answers questions about our billing procedures. Our primary goal is to have satisfied clients. Client satisfaction depends on accurate expectations concerning billing amounts and procedures. We hope this plain English FAQ contributes to this accuracy. Legal fees are a substantial investment. The stakes are high. This report explains the return on the investment. The information should allow you to evaluate any services and how our services can meet your needs. For our existing clients, this information can help you answer questions you may have about your bills. You may also wish to review information from a client perspective.
Answers(See client comments re: costs and benefits of our services.)
These fees may or may not match the cost of your matter. Request an estimate of legal fees. Do not rely on these amounts in your personal and business planning until we accept your Retainer Agreement.
2. How do you justify these fees? Quality and Value: A Summary Outline
The cost of operating a specialty legal practice is unusually high. Immigration legal materials are very expensive, and we must have a complete library. The library consists of not only published materials, but hundreds of memos, opinion letters and telephone messages from our sources. The library must be updated daily. To save legal research time, most of our materials are now on expensive CD-ROM services. Without this information, we could not maximize your chances of success. Immigration practice changes swiftly. Information about these changes is often secret, informal, or hard to find out. We often use crucial new information in a petition that we have received on that same day.
In the practice of law it is common to bill in advance. It is not simply a matter of credit risk. At a small specialized firm it is even more important:
We usually bill for fixed amounts. This allows you to evaluate the real cost. (95% of our clients affirm that they did indeed understand fees and billing policies before the work started.) We occasionally bill hourly when it is the fairest method to both the attorney and the client. The client pays for exactly the time spent on the matter---no more and no less. There is no chance that one client will be subsidizing another client. In case a matter ends prematurely, there is no question as to how much is owed. When we bill hourly the rate depends on the efficiency of the attorney or paralegal---the more experience, the less time spent on a matter, and the higher the hourly rate.
It is not appropriate to use contingency billing or to guarantee results in an immigration matter. As an alternative to such a guarantee, we suggest that you select an attorney who will most likely represent you successfully. It is little consolation to get a refund if your application is denied. Too much is at stake. (97% of our clients are satisfied with the results they received.)
Yes. With our Satisfied Client Rule we stick to our estimates. Exceptions are clearly listed in writing on our Retainer Agreement.
We know the importance of your budget. One of the questions we ask on our concluding questionnaire given to all clients is "Are your fees what your lawyer said they would be?" If the answer is no, we immediately review the past bills and call the client to see where the confusion lies. If an error is on our part, we will credit the account. It is in our interest to keep your fees as low as possible. Why? We must be competitive. To succeed we must have satisfied clients. This goal is impossible to meet when clients are not happy with their fee arrangement. We want our clients to use our services for future matters. Satisfied clients are the best source of referrals for new matters.
7. Isn't It Cheaper If We Did It Ourselves? Perhaps---if you can guarantee a quick approval from the Immigration Service in the midst of complex law and frequent legal changes. Immigration is too important to take chances. What's at stake:
Smart HR managers discover that outsourcing immigration work is less expensive in the long run. HR managers must now handle an incredible variety of employment issues. Using business immigration lawyers, managers can focus their efforts on areas in which they excel. Immigration needs are usually one-time or occasional events. It is difficult to acquire expertise in this complex area with this limited experience. Many times we inform our clients that their immigration route is relatively simple. We advise them that it is in their best interest to file the particular application on their own. We also advise the client of procedures to follow and give them a list of sources for referral. For more information see Do I Need a Lawyer? in the FAQ. Also see how other clients feel after using our services.. What's important to you are results. No matter how inexpensive, without positive results, the outcome will be costly.
Yes. A way to save fees is to move quickly. For example, do not wait until your visa is about to expire to apply for permanent status. This will require renewals of your temporary permit and more legal work.
If you are going to retain our office, do it quickly. Use our expertise before there is a problem. Like life itself, it costs more to fix a problem than to prevent it in the first place. Our fixed fees are already reviewed and adjusted based on the time it takes us.
9. How Can You Keep Fees Down? We take measures to constantly increase efficiency in our office. We are prepared to use the Internet from start to finish. Since "one internet year equals 23 normal years" this results in an incredible time advantage for our Internet clients. We are moving to full internet representation, from initial "do it yourself" fee proposals on the Web, to the final e-mail approval notification message. Time savings are even more remarkable where both the employer and the applicant use e-mail. Our office is now "paperless". All new client matters are stored digitally. Papers coming into the office are scanned, indexed and returned or discarded. Records are duplicated with on-premise and off-premise (using cryptography) storage. We maintain quick reference files on an extensive intranet to save research time. Quick communication also saves time. We now use electronic mail and fax for almost all communications with clients. Our goal is to return telephone calls within 24 hours. (97% of our clients confirm we do this.)
By limiting our practice to border immigration, we give you the advantage of repeated experience on similar cases. This tight focus over the years has produced numerous form letters and check lists which are available only in our office. We do not have to draft requirements letters or common application documents from scratch. If it is more efficient for the primary attorney to do the work, he or she does it. For example, we draft and send many communications directly from the attorney desktop computer to clients. Using special software, lawyers often prepare immigration forms right on their computers. This speeds the message and bypasses the typist. It eliminates the need for rewriting drafts. We also maximize your chance of quick success. If we do not strive for perfection, denials or INS requests for more information will result in more fees and expenses. Read client reports which evaluate our success.
Most predictable expenses are absorbed into the hourly fee. We often bill variable expenses to each client. Almost all lawyers bill for out of pocket expenses. This is because it is fair. Expenses vary greatly from client to client. One client would not want to pay the expenses of another. While estimates of time to be spent on a case are predictable, expenses are not. Some of our clients require expert evaluations. Some do not. Some require international courier services. Others do not. We telephone some clients who live in Buffalo. We must call others in Macao.
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