My husband and I had a standard "cut and dried" immigration case, as I was a US citizen with…read moremyself, my parents, and my grandparents born here, and my husband and I got married and he was born in India. We started working with Goldstein Immigration Lawyers in 2019 after we had our initial consultation, and we liked that they were clear regarding goals, prices, timeline, and what they needed from us. I 100% believe every person/case is "case by case" due to where they are from, what their immigration status is, and the ease of which they can get their documents. For example, I work in an administration role and had experience cataloging binders of documents, and had easy access to my birth certificate, passport, family documents, medical records, but my husband lived/worked in multiple countries and needed time to gather everything. I could see how someone who wasn't fluent in English or had experience with piles of documents or were born in a country/place where records were hard to come by could have trouble.
We were married in summer of 2019, and due to Trump in office, we decided to go "one step beyond" on everything. They wanted copies of letters, emails, and texts? We kept a printed binder of texts from 5 years of our relationship. They wanted samples of our rental documents, utility bills, and ephemera from getting married? I scanned, bagged, and copied files of every single engagement card, wedding card, receipt of my wedding rings, documents from our jobs, our rental companies, or electric/gas/water bills going back 1-2 years, and included photo albums of double the photographs of our families, friends, and us traveling they wanted. People need to realize that this is NOT an easy process, even with the most "basic" immigration cases. We treated this like a second job. We kept receipts of every place we went. We took photos of ourselves when traveling and put them on all social media. We had so many labeled folders and binders of information we ended up buying a personal filing cabinet for it. THAT is the level of work you need to do on your immigration cases, especially those for whom English is not their official language, there are children involved, or one spouse has one type of visa and another spouse has another.
We were in contact with the "main lawyers" during the "big parts" of the process where we had interviews, or citizenship testing at City Hall. During the majority of the process when you're sending them signed documents, copies of things, forms, paperwork, scanned items, you will go through paralegals. Our entire process from beginning to end went from 2019 to Oct of 2024---going back through past emails, I'd say we were handed over to 10-15 paralegals in that time. Some of it has nothing to do with us; it's simply because people left for other jobs, other careers, COVID pandemic had people changing jobs, etc. But the process is very long and although THEY need to bring their A game to the table to help you, YOU and your spouse/family/self need to advocate for yourself. If you can advocate or have family/friends that will help you advocate, ask questions, email, call, then the process will go smoothly.
For example, anything they wanted us to sign, we didn't just sign it. We read the documents together, checked for questions we didn't understand or spelling mistakes, and then sent it back. If we planned to travel out of state or out of the country or my husband got a new job, we asked how that would impact our case first. You CANNOT pay them, sign the documents, and expect it all to go smoothly. There were occasional times I found a date that was wrong or a word misspelled, or they had a piece of paperwork that was incorrect. We HAD to work with them because it was OUR case.
Overall, we loved the lawyers we worked with, the paralegals are young but on top of things, and I appreciated the in-person consultation, the first Zoom consultation we had (again, this was during "COVID world" so things were crazy), but the DAY my husband passed his citizenship test, he was able to take his oath. I also liked that right up front they were 100% clear on how much the process cost, the break-down of fees and when they were due (and for people complaining about the fees, doing the paperwork yourself still costs a lot of money, but with a good lawyer you have peace of mind that everything is being rushed and processed correctly), and when we had any questions, we could email or call at any time. Rarely did it take 24 hours to get a response. Even when our case was slowing down due to COVID lockdown, they would still reach out to simply say "Nothing yet, COVID has delayed things, we will let you know", which helped us feel a lot better.
I would recommend them to ANYONE!
Note: If you are unsure, you can STILL do a consultation, that does NOT mean you are hiring them as your lawyer!
