Every self-respecting American immigration lawyer has a website. Go to the immigration lawyer’s website and read about their experience and education. Check the website of the state bar association that issued the lawyer’s license to see if that lawyer has been disciplined. The website address of the California bar association is www.calbar.org.

Take disciplinary action especially seriously. Lawyers are disciplined rarely and for gross miscalculations after the client has complained and the lawyer has been proven guilty. One can only guess how many gross miscalculations the lawyer has made for which he or she has not been caught and punished. So the slightest disciplinary action from an immigration lawyer should serve as a red flag for you.

Take, for example, the Russian-speaking immigration lawyer in San Francisco, which in interviews on the sites called “a professional immigration lawyer with 15 years of experience.” This lawyer’s page on the California bar association’s website is replete with a list of serious disciplinary actions with suspensions from the practice of law in 2010, 2011, and 2015. Court documents on the same bar page explain that this attorney recruited clients in 2008, took money from them, and failed to appear in immigration court for their hearings in 2009. As a result, the clients lost money and lost their cases.

The court concludes that the attorney willfully, negligently and repeatedly behaved incompetently and failed to return clients’ calls. The attorney agreed to numerous negligence charges. The lawyer was punished rather mildly- suspended from practice for only six months and given three years’ probation, taking into account his admission of guilt, remorse for his actions, and severe depression, from which the lawyer was treated in Russia under a doctor’s supervision with antidepressants and neuroleptics.

In his advertisement, the lawyer is unlikely to talk about disciplinary sanctions or poor work experience
In practice, we see a lawyer who was licensed in 2001, stopped practicing law in 2009, and was allowed to return in late 2016. Whoever counted 15 years of experience here is deliberately silent on the fact that the lawyer was out of practice from 2009 to 2016.