IN THIS GUIDE · Distinguish technical team leadership from primarily managerial duties
Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
Describe actual principal duties
Hypothetical example: a team lead reviews colleagues’ work and also completes substantial delivery. Identify real decisions, authority and work performed. A lead title alone does not establish primarily managerial or executive duties. Review an actual work period and distinguish supervising professional staff, managing an essential function and personally completing the team’s deliverables. A task list should identify which work others perform and which decisions belong to the lead. If most client delivery remains with the applicant, preserve that fact for the primary-duties assessment. Do not convert occasional review meetings into a full management role. Equally, explain real senior authority where it exists instead of relying only on the number of people appearing beneath the applicant on a chart.
Show resources performing operations
Explain who carries out routine work and the applicant’s senior-level responsibility. For a function manager, identify the essential function and operational support. There is no universal headcount or fixed task-percentage shortcut. A function manager must act at a senior level over an essential function and primarily manage it. First-line supervision of nonprofessional workers alone is insufficient.
Preserve qualifying transfer conditions
Generally document one continuous qualifying foreign year within the relevant preceding three years and a qualifying company relationship with continuing business in the United States and abroad. Team success does not replace the individual employment and role evidence.
Apply new-office requirements to actual plans
New-office L-1A needs sufficient premises, qualifying foreign managerial or executive employment and support for the U.S. role within one year of approval. Initial approval is limited to one year. Proposed delegation should not be described as already completed. A new office means less than one year of U.S. doing business. An owner or major stockholder must also show temporary U.S. services and a subsequent foreign assignment.
Establish the qualifying foreign year and active organizations
The qualifying foreign employment generally must be one continuous full-time year within the relevant preceding three years. Its capacity may be managerial, executive or specialized knowledge under the ordinary L rule; the proposed U.S. role has its own category test. Brief U.S. trips do not necessarily interrupt continuity, but U.S. days do not count toward the foreign year. The qualifying group must provide goods or services regularly, systematically and continuously in the United States and at least one other country throughout the relevant stay; registration alone is insufficient.
Show a receiving organization that can support an executive
L-1 begins with a qualifying relationship between the sending and receiving entities as parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate, and family sentiment does not create one. An intracompany petition requires a qualifying relationship between the foreign employer and the American entity, as parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate, evidenced by share registers, purchase agreements and corporate resolutions rather than by an organigram somebody drew. Function management can qualify where the facts support it, and an executive showing rests on discretion over the organisation's direction rather than on being the most senior person present. In a machining business the managerial question deserves care, since operations managers in smaller shops often spend much of their week doing the work rather than directing an organization that performs it. The decision is whether the planned operation can support a principally managerial or executive position within that first year, not whether the transferee can personally keep the venture alive.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.