Delay is the defining feature of immigration practice in Los Angeles and has been for years. We asked a practitioner running a six-person Westlake firm what a multi-year wait actually does to the work — not to the statistics.
What does the wait change about how you take a case?
It changes what I promise, which changes who I can help. If I cannot tell someone whether their hearing is in two years or four, I cannot responsibly take a fee for a strategy that depends on timing.
So I front-load. Everything that can be filed, gathered or preserved now gets done now, because the one thing I control is whether the file is ready when the date finally arrives.
Does the delay help anyone?
Sometimes, and that is uncomfortable to say. Time can allow eligibility to accrue, or circumstances to change in a client's favour. But that is a side effect, not a system working.
Against that you have witnesses who move away, memories that fade, and people living years of their life in a provisional state. On balance it is corrosive.
How do you keep a client engaged over three years?
Scheduled contact whether or not there is news. We call every client every six months even to say nothing has changed — because the alternative is that they hear nothing for two years and assume we have forgotten them, and then they pay someone else to start again.
That call costs us fifteen minutes and saves the relationship. It is the single most valuable operational change we have made.
What does it do to the firm's finances?
Cash flow becomes the whole problem. Work is done years before the matter concludes, so we bill in phases rather than at outcome, and we are careful about how many long-horizon matters we hold at once.
A firm this size cannot carry an unlimited number of files that will not resolve until 2029.
What would you tell someone waiting right now?
Keep your address current with everyone, keep copies of everything, and tell your attorney immediately if anything changes — a move, a marriage, a child, an arrest. The cases that go badly are usually the ones where we found out late.
We call every client every six months even to say nothing has changed. That call costs us fifteen minutes and saves the relationship.Managing attorney, six-person immigration practice, Westlake
What we took away
- Front-loading preparation is the only variable a practitioner controls when hearing dates are unpredictable.
- Scheduled no-news contact every six months was described as the highest-value operational change the firm had made.
- Long horizons force phase billing rather than outcome billing, and limit how many such matters a small firm can hold.
- Delay occasionally benefits eligibility — but at the cost of evidence quality and years of provisional life.
Method
This piece is an editorial composite illustrating how immigration practitioners have described the effects of court backlogs in public commentary and industry reporting — it is not a transcript of one named interview. Wait-time figures are illustrative and have not been independently verified.