Do I need a lawyer if my green card already expired?

Not necessarily. An expired card alone isn't a problem: your lawful permanent resident status doesn't expire with the card. You can still file Form I-90 on your own.You may want an attorney if the expiration coincides with travel that's already booked, if you also have any complex scenarios (criminal record, abandonment risk, name change), or if you need an ADIT stamp coordinated quickly.

Is E-Verify mandatory for all employers?

No. It's voluntary for most employers nationally. It becomes mandatory for federal contractors whose contract contains the FAR E-Verify clause, for employers covered by a state law requiring participation, and as a practical prerequisite for any employer hiring an F-1 student on the STEM OPT extension.State requirements vary considerably in scope, so check the rule for each state where you employ people.

Does an approved I-140 protect my green card process?

An approved Form I-140 preserves your priority date, which you can port to a future petition if you change jobs or employers. After Form I-485 has been pending for 180 days, AC21 portability also lets you switch to a similar role without restarting the process.Our Form I-140 guide covers this in more detail.

How many H-1B jobs can I hold at once?

There is no fixed statutory number. You can hold more than one H-1B concurrently as long as each employer files and maintains its own valid petition with its own I-129 and LCA, and you can genuinely perform each role at its stated hours.In practice, the limit is how many real, properly sponsored positions you can hold at the required wages.

Does premium processing speed up the whole EB-2 NIW green card?

No. Premium processing only accelerates the USCIS decision on your Form I-140 petition, with a 45-business-day target for the EB-2 NIW. It doesn't move your priority date or shorten the visa bulletin wait.So if your country faces a backlog, paying the $2,965 fee won't make the green card itself arrive sooner.

Should we replace immigration lawyers or catalyze their knowledge?

I'm still convinced that execution is more important than strategy. However, some strategic decisions can make or break your business.

One key decision is choosing the industry you want to enter. Many years ago at Kellogg, I read a statistic that stuck with me: 50% of a business's success depends on the industry you choose.

The next crucial decision is your business plan and positioning. Even though our team at Tukki chose to work in immigration, we could have gone in different directions, like selling software to lawyers or automating the immigration process to replace lawyers. Each option would lead to very different business models, clients, company types, required skills, and economic implications.

I’m asked a lot why we chose to work with lawyers instead of running other business model options. I’ll answer that in this article.

Why not sell to lawyers?

To make a significant impact in the industry, we need to address the biggest pain points, which do not lie with the lawyers, but with the immigrants.

After interviewing dozens of lawyers and immigrants, it became clear that immigrants face the most challenges: inefficient processes, lack of visibility, slow responses, stress, and uncertainty. While lawyers could benefit from better technology, we believed we could make a bigger impact by working directly with immigrants.

Additionally, we think that the pain points that immigrants currently experienced can't be solved by software alone. It requires a combination of software and operations. Great lawyers are part of the operations piece, but bringing in business best practices from other industries makes a huge difference for the immigration experience and ease of process for lawyers.

Why not replace lawyers?

Involving immigration lawyers from the start is essential to providing the best service to immigrants — we’ve learned this from personal experience. Immigration law is complex and rarely clear-cut. You need the expertise and judgment of an experienced lawyer. While many steps in the process can be automated, there are moments where a lawyer's input is crucial, such as:

The initial strategy meeting to shape the case
To address legal questions that arise during the process
The final review and legal arguments

Additionally, obtaining a visa or a green card is a life-changing event; immigrants want a team they can rely on, someone to chat with and answer their questions. Our vision of the best immigration experience is the opposite of a self-service, impersonal experience with an AI. We believe in providing a warm, supportive environment with real human interaction.

Why not simply be lawyers?

People often ask, "If you still have lawyers on your team, why should I work with Tukki instead of going directly to a lawyer?"

We combine the best of both worlds: expert knowledge from lawyers and a highly efficient, customer-focused process enabled by our technology.

Neither can deliver the best experience to immigrants alone; you need both.

I admit, this approach didn't come without its challenges! It’s far more complicated to acquire customers, service them, get great lawyers, manage operations end-to-end, and build a great product than just focus on one section of the journey. Scaling is also much easier when you're building a B2B SaaS solution compared to managing operations. That's why, since day one, Tukki has obsessively focused on streamlining operations with technology to become exponentially more efficient and scalable than the status quo.

If you want to truly reinvent an industry, you need to go all in, and that's what we signed up for.

To tap into that expert knowledge from lawyers and efficient, customer-focused process enabled by our technology, start with our Visa Match tool, and find out what your best options for US immigration are.