While immigration policy remains a topic of heated controversy in the presidential contest, the three most prestigious peer-review journals recently announced their annual ratings of the best immigration lawyers. All rating services agree that one group stands above the rest. Attorneys in the Alliance of Business Immigration Lawyers, better known as ABIL, have received far more than the lion’s share of the top rankings — many more than the world’s largest immigration specialty firms.
Based on interviews by researchers who canvassed clients, in-house legal counsel, human resource professionals, and knowledgeable immigration lawyers, here are the findings of the three most respected rating services: Who’s Who Legal includes eight ABIL members in its “North American Corporate Immigration Lawyers” list of the ten “Most Highly Regarded” immigration lawyers; Chambers & Partners names 21 members of ABIL among their select U.S. immigration-law practitioners; and Legal 500 identifies seven ABIL members among the 37 leading US and UK immigration attorneys.
“Rarely does an alliance of lawyers achieve such predominance in a single practice area, especially in a field as complex and dysfunctional as immigration law,” said Angelo Paparelli, ABIL’s founder and past president. “Although ABIL is honored that so many of our lawyers have been recognized,” said Sharon Mehlman, ABIL’s President, “the real value flows to potential clients who can more easily identify the ‘best of the best.’”
“Immigration law is a mystery and a mastery of obfuscation and the lawyers who can figure it out are worth their weight in gold,” a former federal immigration official, Karen Kraushaar, once observed. Although the problems with the U.S.’s broken immigration system are now more perplexing than ever, at least the challenge of identifying extraordinarily talented immigration lawyers has been greatly simplified.
