For employers

The attorney at your consultation is the attorney on your sponsorship case.

This page is for whoever inside the company ends up owning immigration: an HR lead, an operations manager, a founder doing it for the first time. I am the only attorney here, so the person who reviews the filing is the person you spoke to, and two paralegals work the file with me.

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Sponsorship here, at a glance

H-1B, PERM, EB-2 and EB-3, L-1 and EB-1C, and I-9 compliance, for companies sponsoring the people they already employ.

One attorney, start to finish
The person you meet on the scoping call signs the petition. Two paralegals work the file with me.
Flat fees, quoted in three lines
The attorney fee, government filing fees and other costs, staged by deliverable. Never hourly.
Every date docketed on day one
Recruitment windows, extension dates, the priority date to watch. The tracking is mine.
PERM costs sit with the employer
By regulation, not by my choice. The employee cannot reimburse you for that step.

What I handle

The green cards and work visas a company petitions for sit on one employer-sponsored track, and all of it is handled here by the same attorney. Rows with a page link to it; the rest say what I would say on the phone.

EB-1C for multinational executives and managers
The employer-petitioned green card for an executive or manager a multinational moves into its U.S. entity. No labor certification, and the case turns on what the role actually is at both companies, not what it is called.
PERM labor certification
The Department of Labor step before most employment-based green cards. You test the U.S. labor market for the role first, on the Department of Labor calendar, and the record of that test is what gets audited later.
EB-3 green card
The petition that follows PERM, in three subgroups: skilled worker, professional, and other worker. The subgroup changes the wait, so it is decided at the start.
EB-2 with labor certification
The second employment-based preference, reached through the same PERM step. This is the employer-sponsored side; the EB-2 NIW page covers the self-petition route.
EB-1B for university and research faculty
The outstanding researcher green card, petitioned by the university or research employer. No labor certification; the standard is international recognition as outstanding in a specific academic area.
H-1B
The specialty-occupation visa, for most employers decided by a lottery each spring. Cap-exempt employers file outside it, universities and some affiliated nonprofits among them. Check whether you are one before you assume you are not.
L-1A and L-1B transfers
For moving someone from a related company abroad into the U.S. entity. What decides these cases is what the person did there for a qualifying year, in the words the standard uses rather than your job titles.
TN status
For Canadian and Mexican professionals in the listed occupations. Fewer moving parts and easier to get wrong, because the job has to match a listed occupation, not resemble one.
O-1, with the company as petitioner
When the person you are hiring qualifies on their own record, O-1 skips the labor-market step. If you missed the H-1B lottery for someone you already want, price this path first.
Form I-9 and internal review
The employment eligibility record you keep for every hire. A review reads the forms you already have against what the rule requires, before an inspection notice arrives rather than after.

The clock

What a year of this looks like

Sponsorship is not a series of unrelated filings. It is a calendar that repeats, and here is the shape of it, with the parts that land on your desk rather than mine.

Before the cap season, not during it

The H-1B registration window opens once a year in the spring, and the work that decides your outcome happens before it: which roles you would register, whether any are cap-exempt, what each job description says, and the plan for the people who are not selected.

The extension and amendment calendar

Every person you sponsor carries dates, and some move when the job does. A change in location, a material change in duties, a promotion: any of those can require an amended petition before the person keeps working under the new terms. HR tells me about role changes when they happen, and nobody discovers a problem at the airport.

PERM recruitment runs on the regulation's schedule

The recruitment steps and the quiet period between them are fixed by regulation, and the Department of Labor publishes where it stands on analyst review and audits at flag.dol.gov. This is the stage with the least room to move, so a PERM case is planned backwards from the date the person has to be working.

The queue, checked monthly

For most employment-based green cards an approved petition is not the end: the person also needs an immigrant visa number, and the State Department publishes where the queue stands each month in the Visa Bulletin at travel.state.gov. It moves in both directions. Watching it is my job, and it is why the category chosen at the start is a scheduling decision as much as a legal one.

The I-9 review nobody schedules

The one item with no government deadline attached, which is why it slips. Do it once a year on a date you pick, rather than for the first time on a date somebody else picks.

What this costs you in practice is a short conversation when a role changes, one working session before cap season, and documents when they are asked for. USCIS publishes its own processing times and premium processing buys a fixed clock; each visa page walks both.

The honest part

Capacity, answered plainly

If you are moving sponsorship work to a firm with one attorney, the fair question is what happens on the day that attorney is not available.

Who does what

I do the legal judgment and the drafting: which category the role supports, what the record has to establish, and the argument in front of the officer. Two paralegals run the filing work with me, and one is assigned to your matter by name. Every case carries a written checklist of what I need from you, what I am working on, and what comes next, and the employee gets a portal account of their own, which keeps their personal documents out of a shared HR inbox.

The dates do not live in anybody's head

Every deadline on an employer matter is docketed when the matter opens, not when it gets urgent: the recruitment windows, the quiet period, the extension dates, the priority date to watch. A docket keeps working while a person is in a hearing or on a plane. If a date is approaching and you have not heard about it, ask; asking is not an imposition.

When I would tell you this is the wrong firm

If the volume you describe needs a filing department rather than a lawyer, I will say so in the scoping call, not after the engagement letter. The same if the timeline only works with a category I do not think the role supports. Turning down work I cannot do well is cheaper for both of us than doing it badly.

Taking over work already in progress

You can move a matter mid-stream, and companies do it more often than people expect.

What it takes from you

A list of what is pending and where each one stands, the receipt notices, and whatever the current firm has that you do not: the recruitment file on a PERM case, the filed petition and any Request for Evidence on a pending one. You are entitled to your file, and asking for it is a routine request rather than a confrontation.

What I check first

Not the drafting. The dates and the classification: what is actually pending, what is docketed against it, and whether the category the case runs under still fits the role as it exists now. Those two are expensive to discover late and cheap to check early.

When waiting is the better call

A transfer is not free. In the middle of a PERM recruitment, or with a response to a Request for Evidence already drafted and days from its deadline, the right answer is usually to let the current firm finish that step and move the next one. I would rather tell you that in the scoping call than take the file and hand you an avoidable problem.

The PERM record

This one comes out of the disclosure file the Department of Labor publishes itself. Read what it counts before you read the number.

PERM

1,078
certified PERM filings: 99.7%
approval rate

1,078 certified PERM filings at 99.7%, per the 2025 DOL PERM Disclosure Data. It counts PERM labor certification filings only.

Source: 2025 DOL PERM Disclosure Data, published by the U.S. Department of LaborVerified August 8, 2026

Check the data at dol.gov

Where these numbers come from

These figures describe Joe Kwon's work as an attorney over the course of his career, including matters he handled at firms where he practiced before founding Joe Kwon Law, PLLC.

Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Immigration outcomes depend on the facts, the record, the law in effect when the case is decided, and the officer's discretion.

PERM
The classification shaped the case before recruitment started

An employer sponsoring an entry-level hourly role for a green card. The wage classification and the minimum requirements were both settled before a single advertisement ran, and everything the recruitment did afterward had to fit inside them. Nothing has been decided yet, and the record says so.

Employer sponsorship, recruitment complete, no decision yet

Client-identifying detail has been removed.

Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Every case turns on its own facts, its own evidence, and the law in effect when it is decided.

Read the case

Read every published record

Flat fees and the separate government fee
What an immigration lawyer's flat fee covers, why USCIS and Department of State charges appear separately, and what to ask before hiring counsel.
Sponsoring someone for the first time
Most of what makes employer sponsorship hard is not legal. It is that nobody tells a first-time sponsor what the process will ask of them, or when.

See everything in the Reading Room

For Korean companies building here

A large share of the sponsorship work in this region belongs to Korean manufacturers, their suppliers, and the U.S. subsidiaries they are standing up along the corridor into the Southeast. That work has a shape: people move first on L-1A or L-1B, the U.S. entity grows around them, and the permanent question arrives later than it should have.

Two things are worth deciding in year one rather than at the last extension. Whether the role here is genuinely managerial or executive, because EB-1C reads the same facts as L-1A one notch stricter. And how the org chart will be explained, because a reporting structure that is obvious in Seoul is not obvious to an officer at a service center.

Head office and the U.S. team can both work in their own language with the same attorney, so nothing has to be summarized twice by somebody who is not a lawyer.

How employer work is billed

Flat fee per matter, not hourly. The fee is split into stages and each invoice names the deliverable it is for. Government filing fees and other costs, translations and shipping among them, are listed separately from the attorney fee.

One rule here is not mine. On a PERM case the Department of Labor requires the employer to pay the employer's attorney fee and the recruitment costs for that step, and the employee cannot reimburse you for them. Worth knowing before the budget is set.

See the full fee breakdown

How to start

Two steps. Neither is the individual consultation, and neither costs anything.

A scoping call, free

You, whoever else inside the company owns this, and me. It helps to know roughly what you are working with before we talk: how many people, which roles, the timing pressure, and anything already in flight with another firm. Rough numbers are fine. The point is to find out whether the categories you planned to use fit the roles you have, because that answer sets the budget for everything after it.

A written proposal

Scope, the fees in three separate lines, and the calendar the work runs on. You get it in writing before anything is signed, and it itemizes what is included so the parts people argue about later are settled before they start.

Ask for a scope and a quote

Price the question before you price the case.

The cheapest hour in a sponsorship case is the one spent before the category is chosen. The question to settle first is whether the role actually supports the path you were planning to use, and that answer sets the budget for everything after it.

Two ways to start, and who you sit with

The first is a free intake with my team. The second is the paid consultation, and that one is with me.

Intake

15 minutes · Free

My paralegal team, not me

A short conversation to hear what is going on and get it written down properly. My paralegals ask about your status, your dates, your employer if there is one, and what you have already tried. By the end of it you know what a consultation with me would cover and whether it is worth booking one yet.

This step is intake and scheduling. My paralegals do not give legal advice, do not tell you whether you qualify for anything, and do not recommend a visa category. That part is mine, and it happens in the attorney consultation.
Attorney consultation

60 minutes · $150

If you go on to retain the firm for the matter the consultation covered, the fee is credited toward your fee for that case. The credit does not expire.

Joe Kwon, the attorney who would handle the case

This is where the legal discussion happens. You tell me what you have and what you are trying to do, and I tell you what I think, including when I think the answer is no. Some of these end with me not taking the case. That is a real result of the call, not a failure of it. I read what you send before we sit down, so the whole session goes to your question. The consultation runs as a video call, from wherever you are.