VisaBuilder Law

Framework

Are you an industry leader, entrepreneur, or tech innovator who’s building an evidence package for a US green card in the EB-1A extraordinary-ability category?

Are you confused by conflicting opinions from attorneys about your chances? Or overwhelmed by the profusion of EB-1A coaches, consultants, AI agents, groups, and influencers, flooding your LinkedIn feed every day?

Have you built high-quality evidence in EB-1A categories like leading roles, publications, judging, and memberships, without much guidance on how to argue your final merits determination, or how to construct a winning EB-1A narrative?

The EB-1A consulting industry has certainly exploded over the last few years. It’s hard to extract the nuggets of good advice from the mountain of hype and outright fraud out there.

The purpose of VisaBuilder Law is to bring clarity to this confusing process, by sharing the simple legal framework that attorneys use to build winning EB-1A cases. I’m a licensed attorney who’s specialized in EB-1A industry cases for over 25 years. My retirement from actively filing cases has created the opportunity for me to standardize this knowledge and share it with a wider audience.

Intro, context, what this is about.

Approach: Legal advocacy, burden of proof, preponderance. What you have to prove: “Very top of the field of endeavor” and “sustained acclaim.”

Build “final merits” first, not categories. For industry cases this means original contributions.

Visualize from officer’s point of view. Create an avatar. Narrow the field of endeavor. Sketch out your case first. Then add categories.

You’ll have to do most of it yourself anyway.

How I frame an EB-1A case.

1. Build it like a civil trial case or an appellate brief. It’s advocacy. It’s structured to persuade, from beginning to end.

2. The 2 main elements you must prove: “Very top of the field of endeavor” as shown by “sustained acclaim.” The EB-1A categories are just the sub-elements or scaffolding to show these 2 things. Category evidence doesn’t, by itself, prove the 2 main elements. It’s necessary but not sufficient. The categories are just the arbitrary evidentiary structure USCIS uses.

3. I always start building an EB-1A case with the 2 main elements. I visualize first, what a winning petition in your field would look like to the USCIS officer. What would show “very top of the field of endeavor,” as shown by “sustained acclaim,” in field x, y, or z?

4. Current popular frameworks for EB-1A case-building approach this backwards. They emphasize building evidence in categories like publications, judging, and high salary, with no clear plan to prove the 2 main elements: “very top of the field” and “sustained acclaim.”

This approach arises from USCIS’s own Kazarian framework for case analysis. Procedurally, USCIS first counts categories for proof of required legal elements. They then evaluate “very top of the field” and “sustained acclaim” afterward, in the “final merits determination.” Due to Kazarian’s sequencing directives to officers, applicants then view these 2 cornerstone legal elements as an afterthought, almost like extra categories.

Just because USCIS sequences adjudications this way, doesn’t mean that YOU should do that too. The Kazarian approach arose to solve a specific administrative problem of freelancing by individual officers. USCIS’s job approach is not YOUR job approach! Your job is to focus on final merits, first, last, and always: “Very top of the field of endeavor as shown by sustained acclaim.” Kazarian and its procedural ilk will come and go. But Congress’s essential burden of proof for EB-1A – “very top of the field of endeavor as shown by sustained acclaim” – is timeless. It hasn’t actually changed much over 35+ years.

OK, you might be thinking, that’s a great summary of the lawyer’s approach. But what does that mean for you? What if you have no idea how to frame an argument for “very top of the field of endeavor” or “sustained acclaim” for your specialty? How do you build the evidence that shows that? What does it even mean?

The purpose of VisaBuilder Law is to show you exactly how to do that. To work backwards and forwards, between your work achievements and your winning EB-1A petition, to make them meet in the middle. In other words, how to become truly extraordinary, and how to prove it to USCIS.

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