Webinar: 5 Questions Every HR and Mobility Manager Should Ask Their Immigration Counsel

Corporate immigration has changed drastically over the past five years. Adjudication trends, request for evidence (RFE) patterns, compliance scrutiny, and technology expectations have all shifted.

HR and mobility leads may not be able to tell whether their outside counsel has shifted with these trends, until a denial, a missed deadline, or a failed audit tells them.

On Aug. 5, 2026, two people with different perspectives on this problem talked it through: Jeff Joseph, President of Immigration Strategy at Manifest Law and President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which represents more than 18,000 immigration lawyers, and Michelle Windhausen, Global Mobility Senior Advisor at GHD, a multinational professional services firm.

They covered five questions HR and global mobility leaders should ask their immigration counsel.

What’s the human experience for everyone involved?

Ask about the customer experience, for yourself as the employer and for the foreign nationals.

If your company operates globally, ask whether that experience is harmonized across countries, or whether it varies because local counsel in each market works differently.

Then ask for numbers. What does the firm consider a normal caseload for one paralegal or attorney? What share of its overall workload would your account represent, and how many clients your size does it already serve?

If a firm is hired to file 15 H-1B petitions and you have a question that falls outside of those 15 cases, will your firm still answer it? If not, you have a vendor, not a partner.

“I don’t want you to see me as an outside vendor,” Joseph said. “I want you to see me as part of your in-house team.”

How is the firm using technology, including AI?

Every firm has a platform now. Ask what the platform does and how it’s different.

Technology, Windhausen said, should be “a gigantic component, not just something that appears in a sales presentation.” Her questions: what work is automated, and does that benefit show up in efficiency or in your pricing? How is your employees’ data protected? How are humans kept in the loop?

At Manifest, a case starts with what Joseph calls the shoebox. Documents get scanned, optical character recognition pulls the data into the forms, and the system deduplicates it against the applicant’s prior filings. Conflicts get flagged to a human, and a second review takes place before filing.

The system also scores evidence against past approval notices, so the firm learns which exhibits might work best for a file.

Service quality is hard to measure, so ask how the firm measures it. Manifest uses what Joseph calls a sentiment meter: AI reads the correspondence on a case and scores the tone. If someone’s experience appears to be sliding, it shows up on a dashboard.

What do you pay for when a case hits a snag?

“Straightforward cases are a dying breed,” Windhausen said. So ask what happens when a case goes sideways.

Get the pricing model up front. What does a standard fee include? What triggers an additional charge? How does the firm handle a request for evidence, or other unexpected work? Are routine questions covered, or billed hourly?

Her standard: no surprise billing for the employee or for the organization.

Can the firm help you make a case to leadership?

More than an administrative chore, reporting is how you defend a budget.

“Money, budget, spend,” Windhausen said. “That’s really the first thing that my leadership is going to focus on, whether I like it or not.”

So ask whether the firm can break spend into legal fees, government filing fees, and translations, and whether they can project next quarter’s filings from expirations and company policy.

The harder question is: When a policy changes—Joseph gave the example of the government ending Temporary Protected Status for a country—can the firm tell you which of your people are affected and what acting would cost?

Will they scale with you?

Windhausen has absorbed acquisitions that added 10 foreign nationals, and others that doubled her population. Her question is: “How do we make sure that the 200 people that are joining our program will be treated as well and as intentionally as the 10?”

Joseph’s answer is automation. When a company hands over hundreds of new cases, a firm’s technology should make sure the files are uploaded, the data is pulled out automatically, and duplicate records are removed. The system should be built for volume, whether you’re adding 200 cases or 10.

“When we have to scale, we’re not looking at scaling with human beings,” he said. “We’re looking at scaling with technology.”

Watch the full conversation

Windhausen’s version of a good answer isn’t just reassurance.

“I want you to scare me,” she said.

She wants counsel who will be honest about whether a case is weak, about what a case will cost before the bill arrives, and about what risks her program faces.

Want to hear more? Windhausen and Joseph also discussed what to ask in a request for proposal, what counts as routine advice, and how to translate immigration for leadership.

Watch the full conversation here.

Disclaimer. This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Reading it, or contacting Manifest Law through this site, does not create an attorney-client relationship. Immigration law changes frequently, and the information here is current only as of the publication date. For advice on your specific situation, consult a licensed attorney. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. This communication is attorney advertising.