NYC O1 Visa Abogado

You have spent years building a record that most people in your field never reach. The hard part now is proving it on paper, to an officer who has never heard of your lab, your league or your label.

Pollack, Pollack, Isaac & DeCicco, LLP prepares O-1 extraordinary ability petitions from our office at 250 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, for founders, researchers, athletes, musicians, directors and the companies that sponsor them. Our O-1 visa lawyers handle O-1A and O-1B filings, agent petitions for freelance beneficiaries, and the EB-1 green card path that often follows.

We work in Spanish and English, and our team also serves clients in Chinese, Bulgarian, Russian, Hindi and Punjabi. También en español.

Opiniones de clientes

Leer más opiniones

Do I need a lawyer for an O-1 visa?

You cannot file an O-1 petition for yourself. USCIS requires a U.S. employer, a U.S. agent, or a company you own to file Formulario I-129 on your behalf, which means someone has to build the case for you and stand behind it. An O-1 visa attorney assembles that petition: the evidence, the advisory opinion, the itinerary and the legal argument tying your record to the regulation.

The evidence is where most petitions are won or lost. USCIS is not asking whether you are good at what you do. It is asking whether your record matches specific regulatory language, and whether the documents you filed actually prove what you say they prove. A reference letter that praises your talent is worth far less than a contract, a box office report or a citation record.

Are you an O-1A or an O-1B?

The classification depends on your field, and the two carry different legal standards. O-1A covers sciences, education, business and athletics. O-1B covers the arts and the motion picture or television industry.

Comparable evidence changes the calculation for founders. If you are a startup founder with no published articles, USCIS now accepts substitutes such as presenting at major industry events, or holding valued equity instead of a high salary. Film and television petitions do not get that flexibility, so the evidence has to fit the listed criteria directly. USCIS explains both in the Policy Manual chapter on O-1 beneficiaries.

What evidence proves extraordinary ability?

Three of the eight regulatory criteria, at minimum, unless you hold a major internationally recognized award such as a Nobel Prize. The criteria are set out at 8 CFR 214.2(o), and each one has a form of proof that tends to carry it.

Freelancers and self-employed beneficiaries carry an extra burden: the itinerary. Our guide to structuring a Deal Memo itinerary walks through how artists and freelancers assemble a schedule that supports a full three-year approval instead of a short one.

Who files the petition, your employer or a U.S. agent?

Either can, and the choice shapes how long your approval lasts. A U.S. employer petitions when you are joining one company. A U.S. agent petitions when you are self-employed, working short engagements for several employers, or when a foreign employer authorizes the agent to act for it.

Since the January 2025 USCIS guidance, a company you own can also file for you. A corporation or LLC with the beneficiary as owner is a valid petitioner, which opened the O-1 to founders who previously had no obvious sponsor. USCIS covers this in its petitioner requirements chapter.

Agent petitions need a full itinerary: dates of each engagement, names and addresses of the actual employers, and the venues where the work happens. Where the agent shows authorization from every employer, the validity period can cover all of the engagements. Where it cannot, USCIS often limits validity to the work the petitioner directly controls, which is how a three-year request becomes a nine-month approval.

Every O-1 petition also needs a written advisory opinion, usually from a peer group or union in your field. Motion picture and television petitions need two: one from the union, one from a management organization. If no appropriate peer group exists, that has to be established on the record.

How long does an O-1 last, and can you extend it?

Up to three years initially, then extensions in increments of up to one year, with no overall limit on how long you can hold O-1 status. That is a real advantage over H-1B visas and L-1s, which both carry hard caps on total time in the United States.

Extensions have to be tied to continuing or completing the same event or activity. USCIS also admits O-1 holders for up to ten days before the validity period starts and ten days after it ends, though work is authorized only during the validity period itself.

There is no annual quota on the O-1 and no lottery. There is no labor certification and no prevailing wage requirement, because the Department of Labor has no role in O petitions at all. You can file in any month of the year.

Your spouse and unmarried children under 21 can hold O-3 status for the same period. O-3 dependents may study full time, but they cannot work in the United States on that status.

What do the filings cost?

Government fees, separate from attorney fees, currently run as follows. The base I-129 fee for an O petition with 1 to 25 named beneficiaries is $1,055, reduced to $530 for employers with 25 or fewer full-time employees and for nonprofits. The Asylum Program Fee adds $600, dropping to $300 for small employers and $0 for qualifying nonprofits.

Premium processing puts the petition on a 15-day USCIS clock for an additional $2,965, a figure adjusted in early 2026. Fees change, so confirm current amounts on the USCIS fee page before you file.

Why is the O-1 getting so much attention in 2026?

Because the H-1B route stopped being predictable. A September 2025 presidential proclamation attached a $100,000 payment to certain new H-1B petitions, a separate $103,265 fee on cap-subject H-1B petitions was proposed in August 2026, and the proclamation’s payment has been the subject of ongoing federal litigation. USCIS maintains the current position on its H-1B FAQ page.

None of it touches the O-1. The proclamation applies only to specialty occupation workers under the H-1B classification, and the proposed fee is written for cap-subject H-1B filings. For a company that would have sponsored an H-1B and now cannot budget around the uncertainty, the O-1 is the realistic alternative, provided the candidate’s record supports it.

That is the honest caveat. The O-1 is a higher evidentiary bar than the H-1B, not a workaround for it. A software engineer with a strong degree and no public record will usually not qualify. A researcher with citations, a founder with funding and press, or a performer with credits and reviews often will.

Why founders, employers and artists bring O-1 petitions to our firm

Three things tend to matter when a company or an individual is choosing counsel for an O-1 filing: whether the firm has built petitions in your specific fact pattern, whether it can move on your timeline, and whether you can talk to it in your own language.

Employment-based immigration is the firm’s priority practice. We prepare O-1A petitions for researchers, engineers, athletes and company founders, and O-1B petitions across music, film, television, dance and the visual arts, including agent-filed petitions with multi-employer itineraries.

Corporate and high-volume sponsorship. We work with in-house teams and HR departments on repeat filings, coordinating consultation letters, itineraries and premium processing so that a start date does not slip while a union letter sits in a queue.

The attorneys. Conrad E. Pollack, Esq. was recognized in Best Law Firms in NYC by U.S. News and Best Lawyers, Immigration Law, Tier 3, for 2018 through 2021. He was also named among the 10 Best Immigration Attorneys in New York by the American Institute of Legal Counsel in 2017 and 2019, and holds an AV Preeminent rating from Martindale-Hubbell.

Nelson A. Madrid, Esq. is the firm’s Pro Bono Coordinator. He was named a Super Lawyers Rising Star in 2017 and 2018, received the Super Lawyers award in 2023, and runs pro bono clinics in Manhattan and the Bronx.

A bilingual practice, not a translation service. Every attorney here works in Spanish and English. For an O-1 candidate whose degrees, press coverage and contracts are in another language, that changes how quickly the evidence file comes together.

We do not publish approval rates or case results, and we will not promise you an outcome. What we will do in a consultation is tell you plainly whether we think your record supports a petition right now, or what would need to be true first.

Our O-1 work sits inside the firm’s broader work visas practice. Clients across the five boroughs and the metro area also reach us through our Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens y Long Island O-1 pages.

Does an O-1 lead to a green card?

Often, yes, and the O-1 is one of the few nonimmigrant categories where holding it does not undermine a permanent residence filing. Most O-1 holders move toward the EB-1A extraordinary ability green card or, for academics, EB-1B for outstanding professors and researchers.

The standards overlap but they are not identical. EB-1A has ten criteria and you need three, and you can petition for yourself with no job offer at all.

USCIS then applies a second step called a final merits determination, weighing all of the evidence together to decide whether you sit among the small percentage at the very top of your field. EB-1B is different again: two of six criteria, at least three years of teaching or research, and a permanent job offer from a U.S. employer. Both are described in the USCIS EB-1 overview.

An O-1 approval is useful evidence toward EB-1A. It is not a shortcut, and it does not mean the green card follows. The practical advantage is that the evidence you built for the O-1 becomes the foundation of the EB-1 filing, and the years you spend in O-1 status are years you can use to strengthen it.

O-1 visa questions people ask before hiring a lawyer

Start your O-1 petition with a firm that reads the evidence first

An O-1 petition is a portfolio of a career, translated into regulatory language. The record you have already built is usually stronger than you think, and the gap between an approval and a denial is often organization rather than achievement.

Pollack, Pollack, Isaac & DeCicco, LLP works with O-1 candidates and sponsoring companies from our Lower Manhattan office at 250 Broadway, 6th Floor, Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We are a relationship-driven practice, and a large share of our clients arrive through families and colleagues we have already worked with.