Principal Attorney, Moon Law Office, LLC

My name is Janet Moon, and I have a small immigration practice in Syracuse, New York. We typically are helping families, so couples, parents and children, siblings get Green Cards for their family members. We sometimes help people get a fiancee from a foreign country to come here. So mostly different types of family units, sometimes adopted children. They come in, and they sit down and meet with me for maybe two or three hours, and that gives me enough information about their situation to either do the further research I need to do to know what to do for them, or I know enough already to be able to tell them what their legal options are, and then we just spend a lot of time making sure they understand those options. So it's a lot of one-on-one and really connecting with people. So an example of the kind of client we might meet with in consultation is somebody who came to the United States as a student, and now has met somebody that they would like to get married to, who is a US citizen. So that might be a very straight-forward scenario, where we would tell them that they have the option to what's called Adjust Status and apply for a Green Card from inside the US. But there might be complicating factors that we would then tell them, "You are not a good candidate for Adjustment, "and you may need to leave the country, "or you may not be eligible for some reason." Common things that we're looking for that people may not know about before they meet with us are the impact of criminal convictions, if they've in the past violated immigration laws, whether it was knowingly or not, so we're on the lookout for things that might mess up somebody's plans. But often people come to us with a fairly basic scenario. They want to get married, they want to bring their parent to the US, that kind of thing. Because my practice is primarily focused on family-based work, and we don't do any immigration court practice, I can really practice from my office, however, that doesn't mean I get a nine-to-five work day. I'm often doing at least 10 hours average, and I have a small firm, and I run my own firm, so I have a little bit more control over my schedule, but my experience of other people in this field is that the demands are fairly high. If you're working for a bigger firm, I would expect to spend maybe 12-hour days doing immigration work, because there's a lot of pressure on how to price this type of work.