Don't file now and fix later. Don't file now and fix later. Hi, I'm Jim Hacking. I had to say it twice. I'm Jim Hacking, I'm an immigration lawyer practicing law out the United States, out of our offices in St. Louis, Missouri and San Diego, California. Forgot to mention my name of my firm. It's the Hacking Immigration Law. Although, get ready for this, we're getting ready to change our name to Hacking Immigration Law, LLC. So, actually we're in the process. We've actually changed it with the State of Missouri, but we are becoming Hacking Immigration Law. Would love to hear your thoughts on that.
But for this video, "Jim, you're all distracted." Yeah, I am. But I am talking about... What am I talking about? Oh yeah. Don't file now and fix later. I know I'm being a little silly in this video. I hope you enjoy it. Don't file now and fix later. What do I mean by that? Well, I have seen more and more people lately come to me with a denial. And there are easy fixes that could have been made to their applications and to their interview process, that had they made them through the advice of a good immigration lawyer, they would not have a big old mess.
So, when you get denied, if you're applying for a marriage based green card, or even if you're applying for citizenship, bad things can happen. If you apply for citizenship and you're deportable, you can not only get your naturalization denied, you can get put into removal proceedings. And if your marriage based green card is denied and you don't have any other form of status, you can be also sent a notice to appear in immigration court. These are bad things.
And people think, "Well, I'm going to roll the dice. I'm going to take a chance and file this myself. I'm going to see what happens. And then, if something bad happens, if I get denied, or if I get a really complicated notice of intent to deny, or a request for evidence, well, then if that happens, I'll just go hire a lawyer at that point."
This is backwards thinking, this is the wrong way to do it. You're much better off having a lawyer involved from the beginning to prevent you from making mistakes. And the reason for that is, you cannot un-ring the bell, you cannot un-ring the bell. That's an American colloquialism, I don't know if you've heard it before, but basically think about this. The mistake is the ringing of the bell, ding, and it rings, right? You can't undo that if you've blurted something out, or if you presented evidence to USCIS that you shouldn't have presented, or something bad happens at your interview. You, many times, can't un-ring that bell. You can't fix that.
So, I was talking to a young man the other day about his denied green card. And I'm still shell shocked by it. I talked about it in the last video, it was a 14 page denial. And there were all these things in there that if he had only spoken to an immigration lawyer, we could have framed things better. We could have told him, "This is stupid what you're saying." Or, "This is stupid what your situation is. Let us fix it before we file." And I've been doing more helping clients prepare their applications for submission, and I've noticed that sometimes they get sort of mad at us. They get sort of resistant to all the things that we're asking for. They sort of view us as a pain in the ass.
Well, the reason we're a pain in the ass is because we want your case to get approved. And so, I tell people all the time, "Yeah, technically you are my client. You're the one who paid me and you are my client, but really my client is getting your case approved. My client is the approved case, not you as the individual. So, I'm going to push your ass, and I'm going to push you to get us all the things that we need. And I'm going to be a hard ass about it. And I'm also going to do everything I can to squeeze out the opportunity for mistakes."
Now, there's always going to be things that can go wrong. There are always things that we could have done better, but we really want to do everything we can in our power to submit the strongest case possible. And we want to do that from the beginning. That is why I say, "Don't try to do it on your own and then fix it later." That is not the right mindset. That is not the right approach.
Not every case needs a lawyer, but if there's anything complicated, don't roll those dice. Don't take that chance, fix it ahead of time, make sure it's strong ahead of time, and then go back and wait for an approval. If you do it the other way around, it's actually 10 times harder to fix it because like I said, you can't un-ring that bell.
We had someone call us the other day and they wanted us to take over an overseas Visa case halfway through. They submitted very little, and we were going to have to fix it, fix a lot of it, and they wanted to know, "Hey, can I get a discount? I already filed this I130 on my own. You don't have to do that part." Well, it's a lot more work for us to fix it after you've submitted, than had we handled the case from the beginning.
So, we definitely don't give discounts there. In fact, many times we charge more than we do if we had just done it ourselves. So, I hope this all makes sense. Hope you don't think I'm being crabby. I'm not trying to be crabby, I'm just trying to warn you. Don't roll those dice. Don't say, "I'm going to try this and see what happens." Get it right the first time. As Billy Joel said, "Get it right the first time, because that's the main thing."
And we hope you are not doing that, we hope you don't roll the dice. If you need help, give us a call (314) 961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home. We also would love it if you subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you get updates whenever we make videos like this one, which is each and every day. Finally, on Tuesdays and Thursdays you'll find me in our Facebook group and on our YouTube channel answering as many immigration related questions as possible. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
