Preparing for a Lawyer Consultation

What type of questions should you ask a lawyer on your first consultation? Recall that in my first blog entry, one of the tips that I gave was to always write down a list of questions before going to see a lawyer. Here is the list of questions I printed out to ask lawyer#3:

Situation/Goal: Going to Argentina for a year and want to return together to start the process of him becoming a resident.

• What is the best way to do this?
• Fiancee (k1 VISA)
• Do I need to be in US to apply for the fiancee VISA?
• Is it okay to also get married in AR? (may be recorded in embassy registrar)
• Non-immigrant (k3 VISA)
• What is the difference between K3 non-immigrant visa and just applying for residency? Which is better?
• Get married in U.S. and apply for residency
• Are there pros and cons to getting married as soon as he arrives?(does it matter if we say we had planned to get married before coming to US?)
• How soon can he start working once he gets here?
• When can he get a bank account/ driver’s license?
• How much money do we need to have?
• How does the economic situation work out? (ie. if I have money saved and vise versa)
• If I put bills under my name will it help?
• What are your fees? Is there a payment plan?

As you will notice, I added a “Situation/Goal” at the top of my list of questions. I added this section, as it is easy to get lost in all of your questions, and to forget exactly what you want out of the appointment. Obviously you are having the meeting to learn about getting a green card/ applying for U.S. residency, but what is your specific situation and what are your goals? Not only is your situation important for the lawyer to know, but also your goal as well, so he or she can best serve your individual needs. It is also helpful to have what you want written out on paper so you don’t get flustered once you get in the lawyer’s office (something that happened to me each time). One last suggestion is that ordering your questions by relevance and importance is helpful. This can be particularly handy when you are only allotted a small amount of time for your consultation. Even if you don’t get to ask all of your questions, at least you will have asked the most important ones.

Suggestions:

1.   Write your specific situation and goal out before going to a lawyer
2.  Order the questions for the lawyer by importance and relevance

Both of the suggestions I have given helped me out in my consultation with lawyer#3, which will be described in my next blog post.