Read the general business expansion overview
An enthusiastic letter about a promising U.S. launch is not new-office evidence. The first year turns on a lease or equivalent right to premises fit for the work proposed, money the company can actually deploy, and duties the transferee will genuinely perform.
Describe real and planned support separately
Split the launch plan into two lists and label them honestly: secured, and intended. Hypothetical example: a director’s letter describes an eight-person U.S. team, a warehouse and a customer pipeline, while the executed documents amount to a twelve-month sublease and two conditional offers of employment. Both lists belong in the petition, and the second is not a weakness where it is presented as a plan with dates, a budget and a named decision-maker behind it. What damages a file is a forecast written in the past tense. Where hiring is planned, say when, at what cost, funded from where, and what happens to the transferee’s own duties once those people start, because the first-year account is precisely an account of change. Keep the letter’s date visible too: a plan written six months before filing may already have been overtaken by events elsewhere in the record.
Apply the actual role-specific conditions
The two new-office standards are not interchangeable, and choosing between them early saves rewriting the whole file later. An L-1A new office needs premises sufficient for the proposed operation, a qualifying year abroad in a managerial or executive capacity, and evidence that within one year of approval the U.S. entity will support a role that is primarily managerial or executive rather than hands-on delivery. An L-1B new office needs premises together with evidence of the financial ability to pay the employee and to begin doing business, plus knowledge specific to this company’s product, process or procedures rather than skill common across the industry. The management standard that governs L-1A simply does not apply to L-1B. Either way the initial approval is limited to one year, and the extension will be decided on what the company actually did with that year, not on what the original plan promised.
Use genuine employment and business history
History is the one part of the record a letter cannot manufacture. Document one continuous full-time year of qualifying employment with the group abroad within the three years preceding the petition, using payroll records, contracts and organisational charts from that period rather than a present-day description of what the person used to do. The capacity in that foreign year may be managerial, executive or specialized-knowledge under the ordinary L rule, while the proposed U.S. role is tested against its own category, so the two need not match but both must be shown. Short business trips into the United States do not necessarily interrupt the continuity of the foreign year, though U.S. days do not count toward it. The qualifying relationship between the entities — parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate — must be genuine, and the group must be doing business in the United States and abroad. The new-office framework itself applies only while the U.S. entity has been doing business for under a year.
What else is on your mind?
Does being a business owner or director qualify me for L-1A?What employment history should an L-1 transfer review cover?What makes a new-office L-1A case different?Why does an L-2 spouse’s admission record matter for work?Editorial source review: 2026-09-07. General preparation guidance, not an individual assessment.