What 388 petitions taught us about winning O-1, EB-1, and NIW cases

We could have buried the officer in legal citations and a 50-page response. Instead, we did the opposite. We stripped the response down to half the length of the original petition and replaced most of the prose with visuals: bar graphs for citation counts, a timeline for revenue growth, an acceptance-rate table for membership selectivity, exhibit tabs for everything else. Then we reframed the whole case around something the current administration cares deeply about: job creation and investment in the United States. We led with what the founder had actually raised, who he was hiring, and the U.S.-based engineering team he was about to put to work on the broader tech sector.

USCIS approved it… on at least three criteria plus the final merits determination.

That case reinforced something we've been seeing across our EB-1A filings over the past year. The strongest petitions in this environment connect extraordinary ability to tangible economic impact in the United States: dollars raised, jobs created on U.S. payrolls, revenue actually landing on American books. The administration values business, and petitions that speak that language are getting through.

The Spielberg rule

A Steven Spielberg movie catches you in the first few minutes. The hook is in before the audience realizes it's happening. A good petition should work the same way.

The first paragraph or two should tell the officer who this person is and why they matter, in plain language, tied to something real. No legal jargon. No "the beneficiary possesses extraordinary ability in the field of technology entrepreneurship." Something an actual human being can picture in their head.

Say the client is a chef. Most firms would open with something like this:

“Petitioner respectfully submits this petition on behalf of the beneficiary, who possesses extraordinary ability in the culinary arts as demonstrated by his receipt of nationally recognized awards, published material in major media, and service in a critical capacity for distinguished organizations, as set forth in the evidence below.”

That tells the officer nothing. It's a legal Mad Lib. Compare it to how we'd open the same case:

“Chef Ramirez runs a 40-seat restaurant in Brooklyn that has a six-week wait for a reservation. The New York Times gave it two stars. Bon Appétit named it one of the 10 best new restaurants in America. He trained under Thomas Keller at The French Laundry, competed on two seasons of a nationally televised cooking competition, and has been invited to cook at the James Beard House three times. He is one of seven chefs in the country to hold both a Michelin star and a AAA Five Diamond rating.”

Then, right up front, a chart or graph showing which criteria are being argued and where the evidence lives. We don't make the officer dig through 200 pages to figure that out… we put it on page two. Criterion on one side, evidence summary on the other, exhibit tabs across the bottom.

We also don't cite the law (unless USCIS is misapplying it in an RFE, in which case we cite hard). And we don't tell the officer the client is extraordinary. We show the facts and let the officer reach that conclusion on their own.

USCIS officers are doing their jobs. They have a stack of petitions waiting, defined criteria to apply, and limited hours in the day. The best thing a petitioner can do is make that job easy.

The track record

We've been filing O-1 petitions and tracking every outcome in our case management system since 2010. In 2019, we expanded into EB-1A green cards and NIW petitions. Since then, the practice has grown substantially. The year-by-year picture from 2019 through mid-2026:

*2026 through May. On pace for ~98 filings.

388 petitions across that window. Approval rates:

The EB-1A line is the one I'd point to first. Nationally, roughly one in three EB-1A petitions gets denied… we're running close to 90% approval in that same environment. When we do get hit with an RFE, we convert 93% of O-1 cases and 75% of EB-1A cases to approvals (compared to the national O-1 RFE-to-approval rate of about 71%). And when a case gets denied entirely, we've refiled and won 87.5% of the time. From initial filing through RFE response through denial refile, the numbers hold up at every stage.

The question everyone asks

Has the change in administration affected outcomes? Fair question, and one we hear weekly. We split our filing data at January 20, 2025, and looked at what happened on either side.

The O-1 rate barely moved, and the EB-1A rate actually went up. What did change is the RFE volume… USCIS is asking more questions now than they were a year ago. But questions aren't denials. If the evidence is there and the presentation is clear, the case still gets approved. The standard hasn't moved, the level of scrutiny has… and a well-prepared petition can absolutely handle the latter.

When we lose

We've had 17 denials across 388 petitions. No firm wins every case, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something.

What we're more interested in is what happens after a denial. Of the clients who came back to refile with us, 7 out of 8 were ultimately approved. Sometimes that meant refiling the same category with a stronger evidentiary package… sometimes it meant switching strategies entirely. One NIW denial became an O-1 approval. One EB-1A denial became an O-1 extension that kept the client in status while we rebuilt the green card case from the ground up.

The clients who didn't come back may have gone to other firms or decided to go a different direction altogether. That happens. But for the people who stuck with us and let us take another shot, the recovery rate speaks for itself.

The fields

What determines whether a petition wins isn't the field but the evidence behind it. If the evidence supports extraordinary ability, the underlying discipline barely matters… AI models, kitchens, racetracks… the criteria sit on top of the same evidentiary architecture.

The O-1 to green card pipeline

A piece of the strategy that often gets missed: the O-1 and EB-1A criteria overlap by roughly 80%. We treat that overlap as the foundation of a multi-year plan.

In 2026, nearly half of our EB-1A filings were for clients who'd started with us on an O-1. That's the strategy working as designed.

The pattern

We've been at this long enough to know what works. File every criterion the evidence supports. Present the facts visually wherever possible. Make the officer's job to read and decide as easy as it can reasonably be, and tell the story like it's the opening of a film and not the closing brief in a hearing.

388 petitions, approval rates well above the national average, steady through every administration we've practiced under… and when a case doesn't go our way the first time, we tend to come back and win it on the second attempt.

If you're trying to figure out whether you'd qualify, that's what a consultation is for. We'll look at your background, tell you honestly where you stand, and if we take your case we'll file it the way we'd want to see it if we were the officer on the other side of the desk.