Do you file lawsuits on cases filed by other attorneys. Hi I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. Today's question comes from Atif in our Immigrant Home Facebook group. If you're not in our Immigrant Home Facebook group, you should join. We share a lot of information, I try to pop in there to answer questions when I can, questions of a general nature, not going over the details of a specific case, but Atif wants to know the answer to this question. Will I file a mandamus lawsuit on behalf of a USCIS or overseas visa applicant who is represented by another attorney? The answer to this question is yes, you've already paid that attorney to handle the underlying case, and the fact is I don't want to get involved in the underlying case. I just want to be the lawsuit lawyer.
I want to file a lawsuit to get your case moving. And I'm not that interested in taking over the underlying case. You've already paid the other attorney for that, I'd rather have them handle it. So we see this a lot in the overseas visa cases. So people have hired a lawyer to bring their family member to the United States, they've done all the paperwork, then they come to us and they ask us to file a lawsuit on behalf of them and their spouse, or their fiance, or their parents in an effort to try to get them here faster. This also happens in citizenship cases and we've had a lot of interesting scenarios. So it's up to the client whether or not they want to tell the lawyer about the lawsuit. I think generally it's a good idea to tell your lawyer if you're going to sue them.
And Atif was discussing that in some other questions in the Facebook group. And I think it's good to tell the lawyer, but sometimes they don't tell the lawyer and then we file the lawsuit and then the lawyer calls up and says, "Oh, you won't believe what just happened. Your case got scheduled for an interview." And they'll be like, "Well, of course it did. It's because I sued them," and they'll be, "Oh, you sued them." So a lot of lawyers aren't comfortable filing lawsuits against the federal government. They haven't done it before, they don't know how to do it. This is something that we've done over 650 times. It's my favorite thing to do, it's pretty much all that I do, Jim, our law firm does all kinds of immigration, but this is the one thing that I do.
So Atif, in answer to your questions, you can keep your lawyer, you can have them continue to handle your case. Every now and then in a rare number of cases, usually where people never had a lawyer involved at all, we do get involved maybe at the National Visa Center, or at the Embassy, or at the USCIS office, but that's extra, that's separate from the agreement to file the lawsuit. The lawsuit is just for us to represent you in federal court, asking a federal judge to compel the government defendants to move on your case. If you want us to, for instance, file the DS260 or take over or help with responding to a request for evidence, we'll do all that. But that wouldn't be me, that'll be other lawyers in our office and that's only after we discuss it and it's something that you decide to hire us to do extra.
So I hope Atif that answers your questions, if it didn't 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. And if you like this video, we ask you please share it out on social. And to subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you get updates whenever we make videos just like this one, thanks a lot. Have a great day.
