Miller Mayer, LLP
Providing Unparalleled Immigration Services

Established over 30 years ago, Miller Mayer, LLP (Miller Mayer) is an internationally known law firm. The company started as a local law firm providing counsel in areas such as matrimonial and property law. Their journey in the immigration space began in 1990 when renowned immigration scholar and attorney Stephen Yale-Loehr joined the firm. Since then, Miller Mayer’s immigration practice has expanded exponentially. It presently includes eight immigration attorneys and a multitude of paralegals.

Miller Mayer’s immigration service offerings are the epitome of the term “diverse.” They have counseled individuals seeking permanent residence for family members and assisted thousands of individuals to get green cards through investment. Miller Mayer has also provided decades-long representation to multiple large healthcare systems ensuring that their physicians acquire waivers, temporary visas, and green cards. The company has represented DACA recipients, individuals in removal proceedings, individuals of extraordinary ability, asylum seekers, and everyone in between. They have truly touched almost every type of case under the sun.

Following is the conversation that Manage HR had with Kristal Ozmun and Sandra Bruno, Attorneys at Miller Mayer, LLP, to understand their breadth of immigration knowledge and experience as well as their ability to efficiently serve high-volume clients.

What are some of the pain points that your clients are facing today?

Many companies are struggling to attract and retain talent, as the pandemic has highlighted the ability of companies to offer remote work to qualified individuals anywhere in the U.S. This has resulted in a much smaller applicant pool for small-to-mid-sized companies. We provide creative immigration solutions for companies to attract and retain potential employees. For example, many large companies use two basic temporary visa categories to employ non-immigrant workers: F-1 optional practice training and H-1B. In contrast, Miller Mayer uses the following visa options, among others:

• Make a cap-exempt argument for the employer based on affiliation or “employment at” a cap-exempt entity to secure a cap exempt H-1B
• Make an O-1 filing for the beneficiary
• Proceed straight to a green card filing through PERM, NIW or EB1A

Our solutions allow clients to retain employees when other, more traditional options fail or are unavailable.

Please cite a case study where you have helped the clients in attaining what they wanted.

One of the areas in which Miller Mayer has extensive experience is healthcare immigration. Our clients range from small medical offices to large, multi-state healthcare networks. We have excellent working relationships not just with our clients, their foreign employees, and the HR personnel at our client companies but also with the various government agencies involved in physician immigration work, which can include J waivers, H-1B petitions, and green card petitions. Recently, one of our large healthcare client companies was able to successfully recruit a larger than expected number of foreign physicians.

Despite having been advised by a government agency that it could not recommend any further J waivers for our client due to the large number it had already recommended the prior year, our expert attorneys were able to successfully present creative and novel arguments that showed the need for additional physicians in that particular rural region. We worked with our client’s executives and various departments to provide data-based evidence to the federal government agency to demonstrate how the criteria they used were not applicable to our client’s situation. As a result of Miller Mayer’s persistent efforts, our client was able to obtain recommendations from the federal government agency for all the foreign physicians it had recruited for the year. Securing the necessary immigration benefits needed to seamlessly recruit and onboard foreign employees is our top priority, and we enjoy the opportunity to accomplish this for our clients.

Miller Mayer is also widely known in the investment immigration sector and thus routinely handles extremely complex cases in this area. We recently “re-adjusted” an EB-5 investor client from conditional permanent resident (CPR) status to permanent resident status in the U.S. Our client was the derivative beneficiary of an early EB-5 investor in the class colloquially referred to as the “stranded investors.” These individuals filed and had their I-526 petitions approved under the original guidelines for the EB-5 program. When those requirements were changed without notice in 1998 and applied retroactively, these early EB-5 investors were “stranded” and unable to remove the conditions on their CPR status.

Our client had thus been a CPR for over 20 years. Regulations generally prevent “readjustment” from one permanent resident status to another, but our firm utilized a little-known avenue and form to enable the client to give up her original CPR status and acquire permanent resident status on another basis.

What separates Miller Mayer from other players?

Several years ago, we transitioned our storage and computing systems to the cloud. We developed a proprietary immigration tracking and client management system on the Salesforce platform. By building the system in-house with the help of Salesforce designers, we created a system that meets our and our corporate immigration clients’ exacting standards and needs. For example, we can generate bespoke data solutions and reports for our clients.

Although technological innovation is an important tool in providing legal services, our core competence remains the knowledge and experience of our attorneys and staff. Our team of immigration attorneys includes internationally recognized leaders in the field who are consistently recognized for their work by Chambers and Partners, Super Lawyers, Who’s Who Legal, and Best Lawyers. In addition, our attorneys have held national leadership positions with influential organizations such as the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Alliance of Business Immigration Lawyers, Invest in the USA, and the U.S. Alliance for International Entrepreneurs. Their competence, expertise and thought leadership allow us to craft successful and creative legal solutions.

Our touchstone has always been excellence, customer service, our location, and its unique attributes. We are based in Ithaca, a college town in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. It surprises some that a law firm with our reputation and global reach is not based in a large city, but the unique cultural and intellectual diversity of Ithaca is perfectly suited to the perspective and outlook necessary to successfully serve clients around the world.

What does the future hold for Miller Mayer?

We continue to focus on technology in providing superior client and end-user experiences and ultimately results. We are finalizing a comprehensive web-based client portal that will increase efficiency and ease of use for our clients and us. The immigration process can be labor-intensive, with multiple forms, deadlines, and evidentiary requirements, and it can be stressful for a company’s employees. Technology can improve the user experience, increasing process transparency while enhancing and expediting client communication and feedback. Integrating our Salesforce platform with AI form generation and smart questionnaires will significantly reduce input errors, streamline client onboarding, and provide our corporate clients with a single point of contact, even when multiple employees may be involved.