“...The mindset of immigration law as a tech-enabled industry is becoming more mainstream. It's becoming more normalized…” — Roman Zelichenko

Roman Zelichenko is an immigration attorney and startup founder. While practicing at a high-volume employment immigration firm, he began to think about different ways that technology could enhance the immigration practice. He’s now the founder of LaborLess, a technology company that automates H-1B visa compliance, and GMI Rocket, a digital marketing agency focused on the immigration industry.

Litify sat down with Roman to discuss how immigration firms can unlock growth and innovation through 2024 and beyond. Watch the video — or read up on a few of the highlights below:

What have you learned or observed about immigration firms that make them unique?

Roman Zelichenko: The mindset of many immigration firms is very high-touch. I feel like they often forget they’re a business, and the “business” is the byproduct of the work they love doing. They give clients their cellphone number. They may have a flexible work schedule, but if they’re needed at 2:00 in the morning, they’ll be there. They build these close relationships with their clients, which is how they love to work, and it’s what their clients love about them.

In other industries, businesses have a different mindset — that the business is first, it’s there to make money, sell something, or provide a service. There’s a positive outcome, which the business can feel good about, but it’s usually not the primary reason the business exists. 

Immigration lawyers can be quite the opposite. If they’re paying their bills and getting by, they’re happy. However, I’ve learned that while that works in the beginning, many immigration attorneys end up burning out at the end. They’ve been so mission-driven that they haven’t thought about their firm as a scalable business that can be more efficient.

That’s why I love this conversation about mindset. Many immigration firms need to remember, or even learn, that they are also businesses, and they, too, deserve to be run and benefit from efficient ones. I believe the immigration mindset this year should be about believing they’re worthy of investing in themselves and worthy of better technology. 

I feel those two things go hand-in-hand — if you have the mindset of personal growth and worthiness that will lead you to invest in yourself, and a really important way to invest in yourself as a law firm is through technology.

How can the immigration industry embrace technology?

Roman Zelichenko: I recently gave a presentation on change management, and some fairly large firms in the room had never heard of it. So, first, firms should start by going back to the basics to understand how change works and how to look at their current processes in a systematic way to identify any challenges and potential solutions that can help solve them.

As a law firm, or any business, growth doesn’t happen without having done something right, but it also doesn’t mean everything is right. You may get under the hood and realize the journey to growth has been a bit haphazard. You plugged a hole over here, put a band-aid over there, and now you need to take a further step back and evaluate the structure systematically.

As firms continue exploring new technologies, they should do so in a process-oriented way, and change management is a discipline that can help.

Second, I remember Google had this 80/20 rule where 20% of the time, employees were dedicated to exploring side projects. I know at least a couple of law firms that have skyrocketed in growth — and technology is definitely part of that growth — but they’ve also allocated this “20% time” within their partnership to learning about it. I’m talking about their named partner who is a practicing attorney is allocating time to playing around with technology. They actually take on fewer cases and exploring technology is part of their workload. I think allocating time, and likely some budget, to basically law firm research and development (R&D) is crucial.

To me, that’s the practical way for the industry to embrace technology. Be proactive about it, and don’t dissociate, or remove yourself, from exploring it.

Finally, to get very practical, this “exploration” can also be as simple and straightforward as attending conferences, finding webinars or virtual communities, or even following folks on social media who are sharing their learnings and best practices. I encourage everyone to get out into the industry and meet other professionals who are trying to do the same and talking about it!

Artificial intelligence in legal is the new hot topic. Is the immigration industry ready for it?

Roman Zelichenko: This might be a little controversial, or at least not as straightforward as “yes.” I would say the reality is that most immigration firms are still so far away from having AI be useful to them. I think the amount of discussion around this topic doesn’t accurately reflect what’s happening on the ground. There are so many law firms where the basic technology infrastructure is still pretty behind to take advantage of it.

There are still a number of firms that are still more or less using paper. And while a majority of firms are using something computer-based at this point, there are still many where it’s not anything cohesive or truly cloud-based. To be fair, in the immigration space, there are a lot of solo practitioners or smaller firms that don’t need a massive system because it’s just them or one or two other people. But as a practice, I think what this all means is that when we talk about AI or the “bleeding edge,” we’re bleeding so far away from where a majority of the industry is, that it’s just science fiction to them to some extent. 

I just don’t feel we’re at a point yet where AI is going to make a truly meaningful difference until a broader majority of law firms transition their basic infrastructure to something that’s more tech-forward, cohesive, and transparent. Otherwise, it’s really difficult to jump from where they are into leveraging generative AI or predictive analytics.

That’s the practical, controversial answer, but the business answer is that the industry continues to push, which I’m so happy about. The bleeding edge is pretty awesome. Immigration and the legal industry in general have always felt like a laggard in terms of technology, but that gap is closing. Advancements like AI happen in the broader technology space and are much more quickly coming to legal. Further, immigration law, as an often flat-fee environment, can be more incentivized to use technology because they’re not billing by the hour — they want to minimize the time spent per case so they can maximize revenue.

That mindset of immigration law as a tech-enabled industry is becoming more mainstream. It’s becoming more normalized, which is awesome. My point though is that even if that’s the case, before all these law firms can actually start using these advancements, they’ve got to upgrade their current technology and get into that mode.

Get your mindset right — and drive growth and innovation this year

Roman Zelichenko: Ultimately, law firms are effectively marketing themselves through their technology. There are great lawyers and legal professionals in every niche because if they weren’t good, they’d be disbarred.

Law firms can’t really sell that they have great, competent attorneys because that’s a requirement. So what can they sell? They can sell their availability and support, different strategy services, or they can sell their technology. Technology is probably the most important component. 

For a law firm to be able to say, “Here’s what we think is our secret sauce in terms of supporting a company like you,” is a huge differentiator. Every firm that’s scaling successfully has a secret sauce, otherwise, they wouldn’t be as successful. To have software that enables you to standardize and automate that secret sauce rather than being forced into workflows that the software requires — and get rid of that secret sauce — is really important moving forward.