Written in Partnership with Amir Bakian
As a seasoned immigration lawyer, Jon Velie is no stranger to the intricacies of the law. He faces them daily in his firm, Velie Law Firm and OnlineVisas Inc., a tech company with an AI platform and an online community that helps immigration increase their knowledge and efficiency. OnlineVisa’s mission is to increase visa approval rates through suggested AI delivered authority that helps attorneys provide industry leading strategy and build best of breed legal briefs and other documents quickly to and ensure more clients achieve their American dream
Immigration attorneys face the challenge of an ever-changing body of law and a US governmental agency that can make inconsistent decisions. To date, software solutions for Immigration attorneys have been limited to case management systems and form building packages. Jon has used them all. He knows you can lose a case in the form, but you win a case with briefs that identify and answer issues. He built OnlineVisas.com Visas.AI platform to help attorneys create strategies and see issues. The answers are delivered from an ever-growing database called Winning Strategies. This use of artificial intelligence makes attorneys better and faster, it does not replace them. It gives them more time to communicate with clients and have a healthier work life.
Velie Law Firm’s results in June 2022 are perfect proof of that. That month, the firm used Visas.AI to file 70 H-B visas in a single day and 460 H-1Bs for over 100 companies in a month. This was a massive improvement over the previous year’s record when they filed a total of 457 visa petitions of all types. The platform helped the team obtain a 100% approval rate for H-1B visas filed in the past two years, surpassing their 95% approval rating during the Trump Administration when the national approval rating dropped to under 60%.
The success rate is based on the attorney guided platform that builds a color magazine-style brief that identifies, and answers issues typically raised in US immigration before it asks them. This strategy is far more effective than the typical Immigration process of a short cover letter listing evidence that is left to US immigration adjudicators to interpret. OnlineVisas will support its brief by building expert and reference letters that analyze the other evidence.
OnlineVisas does not only help business Immigration cases, but was put to task to help Asylum and Refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine. Jon’s firm and a team of asylum attorneys were recruited to use the platform to file cases.
OnlineVisas will release their Visas.AI platform for subscription to immigration attorneys in fall of 2022. Their goal is to scale this product using a marketplace technology concept, and impact over 1 million lives in the next few months.
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