How Do You Choose a US Immigration Lawyer From Europe?

Part of our Cross-Border Tax and Company Visas services

Start with the question that eliminates most of the market: is this person admitted to a US state bar? Only licensed US attorneys and accredited representatives of recognized nonprofit organizations may represent you before USCIS and at a consulate. Everyone else, including the visa agencies and immigration consultants that advertise heavily to European clients, may not. Past that threshold, the criteria that separate good advisors from adequate ones are cross-disciplinary, because a US move touches company formation, US federal tax, and your existing estate and wealth structure at the same time, and those pieces interact. This article sets out the criteria to apply, the questions to put to a firm before you sign an engagement letter, and the trade-offs between the four categories of provider competing for your file: a US-licensed boutique based in Europe, a large firm’s immigration practice, a visa agency, or doing it yourself.

Who is legally allowed to represent you before USCIS?

Only attorneys admitted to a US state bar and representatives accredited by the Department of Justice to work for recognized organizations may act as your representative in an immigration matter.

The rule is 8 C.F.R. § 292.1, which sets out the permitted categories: attorneys as defined in 8 CFR 1.2, accredited representatives of organizations recognized by the Board of Immigration Appeals, law students and law graduates working under supervision without pay, accredited officials of your own government, and unpaid reputable individuals with a pre-existing personal connection to you. Note what the regulation does with that last category. Permission “will not be granted with respect to any individual who regularly engages in immigration and naturalization practice or preparation, or holds himself or herself out to the public as qualified to do so.” A business that advertises immigration services and charges for them is specifically excluded.

USCIS says the same thing in plainer language on its Avoid Scams page: “Only attorneys or accredited representatives (or certain law students or law graduates working under their supervision) are authorized to represent you on immigration matters before USCIS.”

What can a visa agency or immigration consultant not do?

A consultant cannot represent you. In practice that means no G-28, no signature on your petition as your representative, no reply to a request for evidence, and no appearance at the consulate.

The Form G-28 is the concrete test. It is the Notice of Entry of Appearance as Attorney or Accredited Representative, and it puts a representative on the record so that USCIS corresponds with them and deals with them on your behalf. A consultant cannot file one. If the case draws a request for evidence, which is routine in E-2, L-1, and O-1 practice, the consultant cannot answer it in your name. If the consular officer asks how the petition characterized your role, you are alone with an answer someone else drafted.

The American term for this is notario fraud, from the mismatch between a US notary public, who has no legal training, and a Latin American notario público, who does. European clients meet the same structure under different branding: a “visa service,” a “relocation consultancy,” a “global mobility agency.” The branding does not change the regulation.

That is the reason the threshold matters more than any other criterion on this page. The 3 and 10 year bars for unlawful presence run out. A misrepresentation finding does not. When a preparer overstates your investment, describes a manager’s duties in language the facts do not support, or files a document you never read, the consequence attaches to you and stays with you.

Three further points follow from the same regulation, and they stay invisible until something goes wrong. There is no attorney-client privilege with a consultant: what you tell a US attorney about a prior visa refusal or a problem in your ownership history is protected, and what you tell a consultant is not. There is no disciplinary recourse either, because a state bar can suspend or disbar an attorney and open a complaint process to you, while an unlicensed preparer answers to no professional body. Your remedy there is an ordinary civil claim against a business that may have no assets and may not exist next year. And there is no duty of competence. A licensed attorney owes you a professional standard of care, usually backed by malpractice insurance. Someone filling in forms owes you nothing of the kind.

Does a German Rechtsanwalt or Nordic advokat count?

Not for US filings. Admission to a German, Swedish, or Norwegian bar carries no authority to practice US immigration law, and the qualification is separate from US bar admission.

A European lawyer who is not admitted in a US state stands in the same position as anyone else who is not admitted. There is one narrow exception in § 292.1(a)(6): a foreign attorney in good standing where they practice may represent parties before DHS in matters outside the United States, if the DHS official allows it as a matter of discretion. That is a limited permission subject to someone else’s discretion, not a substitute for admission, and it does not cover the USCIS petition work at the center of most business cases.

The useful version of this criterion is not “avoid European lawyers.” It is: ask where the person signing your petition is admitted, and confirm it yourself with that state bar. A firm based in Europe is not the problem. A firm based in Europe with nobody admitted in the US is.

What does a US move actually involve besides the visa?

Almost always three other workstreams: forming and structuring the US entity, planning US federal tax before you arrive, and checking how your existing estate and wealth structure behaves once you are a US tax resident.

Treat each as a question you put to any firm, and listen for whether the answer is specific.

On the corporate side, ask who decides the entity type and the ownership structure, and whether that person is talking to whoever runs the immigration case. Corporation or LLC, which state, who holds the shares, how the capital arrives: these are immigration facts as much as corporate ones. Our US company formation work sits inside the visa strategy for that reason.

On tax, ask what happens before you move rather than after. Pre-move planning, the timing of your arrival relative to the US tax year, FBAR reporting and FATCA exposure on your European accounts, and the exit tax questions that may arise on the home-country side all have deadlines that pass quietly. A US firm advises on US law, so the honest answer to a question about German or Swedish exit taxation is that it must be worked out with your Steuerberater or local tax advisor. Ask how that coordination happens in practice and who initiates it. Our cross-border tax planning is built around that split.

Vinland Immigration is a US immigration law firm whose attorneys are admitted in the United States and based in Frankfurt, advising founders, investors, and families across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Nordic countries, and the rest of Europe. That combination is what the rest of this section is about: US law, applied from inside the client’s own time zone and alongside their existing advisors.

On estate and wealth, ask whether the firm will talk to your existing advisors. If you have a family trust, a holding structure, or a portfolio managed in Zurich or Stockholm, US tax residency changes how those are treated. Foreign trusts that were straightforward under home-country law can produce grantor trust treatment, throwback rules on accumulated income, and reporting obligations on Forms 3520 and 3520-A once a US person is a beneficiary or settlor. None of that is an immigration question, and all of it is triggered by an immigration event.

“The visa is usually the easiest part of the file,” says Kari Foss-Persson, Esq., Managing Partner at Vinland Immigration. “What clients get wrong is the order. They form the company, then discover the ownership split does not support the visa they wanted.”

Should one firm handle the visa, the company, and the tax?

Handling the whole move in one place beats hiring four specialists because the corporate structure is frequently the immigration case, and an advisor who sees one slice cannot see the constraint the other slice imposes.

The E-2 requires that treaty country nationals own at least 50% of the enterprise or otherwise hold operational control. The cap table decides the visa. Bring in a US co-founder at 55%, or take investment that dilutes the treaty nationals below half, and the case fails on ownership no matter how good the business plan is. A corporate lawyer optimizing for a clean financing round and an immigration lawyer who sees the structure afterward will produce exactly that outcome.

The L-1 requires a qualifying relationship between the foreign employer and the US entity: parent, subsidiary, branch, or affiliate. Here the entity structure is not a precondition for the immigration case, it is the immigration case. Whether the German GmbH owns the US corporation directly or both sit under a holding company changes the evidence you need to prove the relationship.

Timing an arrival across a tax year changes your US tax residency outcome, and residency changes the treatment of everything else: the trust, the pending share sale, the European accounts. Move in November instead of January and the answer differs.

One advisor who sees the visa, the entity, and the tax position at once can sequence these. Four who each see one slice will each optimize their own piece, and the client meets the conflict at the worst moment. Our legal checklist for moving your business to the US sets out the full sequence, and our relocation package is that single coordinated engagement in practice.

Big firm or boutique: what actually differs?

The structural difference is who does the work. At a large firm the partner in the pitch meeting is usually not the person drafting your petition, and the economics are built that way.

This is about mechanics, not quality of lawyering. Large immigration practices run on a leverage model: partners originate and supervise, associates and paralegals draft. That is efficient for a corporation filing hundreds of H-1Bs a year, and it is where large firms genuinely outperform. For a single founder’s E-2 with an unusual ownership structure, the same model means your case is drafted by someone you have not met, your file queues behind larger corporate accounts, and an associate leaving mid-case hands your file to a colleague who reads it fresh. Hourly billing also rewards time spent on the file rather than the file being finished.

A small firm where the admitted attorney handles the case personally has the opposite profile: the person you spoke to drafts the petition, the case moves as fast as the evidence allows, and there is nobody to hand it to. That last point cuts both ways, which is why the questions below matter more than the category.

Doing it yourself is a real option and USCIS says so directly: “You do not need a representative to file forms with USCIS. You may file forms by yourself and represent yourself before USCIS.” For a straightforward filing with clean facts, that is sound. It fails for most business cases because E-2, L-1, and O-1 filings are exercises in characterizing facts, and the characterization is where cases are won, lost, or made permanently unfixable.

How is a US immigration lawyer’s fee structured?

Two models dominate: a fixed fee for a defined filing, or hourly billing. Which one you are offered says more about the firm than the number attached to it does.

A fixed fee tells you the firm has done enough cases like yours to price the work, and it puts the risk of the case taking longer on the firm rather than on you. Hourly billing is the norm in large-firm immigration groups, and it rewards time spent on the file rather than the file being finished. A visa agency will usually quote a flat fee too, but for form preparation rather than representation, which is a different service sold in similar language.

Ask for the fee structure in writing, and ask specifically what an RFE response costs. That is where quoted fees and final fees most often diverge, because a request for evidence is routine in E-2, L-1, and O-1 practice and can be treated either as covered work or as a new engagement. Ask the same question about a consular interview, a refiling after a denial, and the corporate and tax workstreams, which are frequently billed separately even inside one firm.

What should you ask before signing an engagement letter?

Ask questions with checkable answers. Anything about experience or reputation invites a comfortable reply, so ask about mechanics instead.

One more, and it is the question firms answer least comfortably. Ask what the firm would need to see to tell you your case is weak, because an advisor who has never declined a case is selling rather than advising.

How do you decide?

Apply the threshold first, then the coordination question, then the mechanics. The order matters, because a firm that fails the first test cannot make it up on the others.

Confirm US bar admission and verify it independently. Then establish whether one advisor, or a coordinated group, will handle the entity, the tax position, and the immigration case together, and get that coordination described concretely rather than promised. Then ask who drafts, who replies, and how long it takes, and compare the answers across firms.

“Ask the firm to explain how your ownership structure affects your visa,” says Kari Foss-Persson, Esq., Managing Partner at Vinland Immigration. “If they treat that as somebody else’s question, you have your answer.”

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