Frequently Asked Questions

Yes! One of the things we appreciate most is the beautiful diversity of the clients we serve. Our team can speak with callers in English, Spanish, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Croatian, and other languages (depending on team members’ availability).  

Potential clients should please inform us of their language needs when they call to schedule a consultation. If we do not have an in-house interpreter, there may be additional interpretation fees for the case. If we cannot accommodate a language need, we may be able to refer the caller to another attorney if we know of one who can serve those language needs. 

Please also inform us of any accommodation that may be needed other than language skills. If a potential client would have trouble understanding or hearing a conversation by phone, we may be able to schedule a video phone call. No in-person meetings are scheduled between staff and clients, but we will do our best to accommodate needs virtually. 

We do not let friends or family members interpret for consultations or other conversations with our team because we need to protect confidentiality and ensure that a potential client/applicant can maintain attorney-client confidentiality and speak openly about their immigration options. 

Our consultation process is designed to help potential clients get the full benefit of an informed opinion from the attorney during the first meeting. It is important for a potential client to cooperate with all legal team members and their requests for documents and information to prepare for the first meeting with an attorney.  

Our office works as a team. This means that a potential client may speak with many different team members as they work with us from start to finish. No matter which staff person you are directly working with, please know that we are all working together to help you. 

Step 1: Scheduling and Paying for a Consultation: If you are interested in learning about immigration options related to a T visa, U visa, Adjustment of Status, or any other immigration remedy, you should pay our consultation fee to reserve an appointment date. Our phone number is 910-509-7145.

All consultations are virtual – usually by phone. Our office does not schedule any in-person consultations. Please do not come to the office physically, but rather be ready to receive a phone call or video call as you have been instructed by staff. This is primarily for the health and safety of our staff and clients, and it also allows us the opportunity to serve people outside of our town.

Step 2: Intake Meetings with Legal Team to Prepare for Consultation:

General Intake: Before your consultation call with an attorney, you can expect one or more phone calls and/or emails from our legal team. Please be cooperative as they ask for information and documents to help prepare a packet for the attorney’s review before the first phone call with the attorney. You may be asked to send scans or copies of identity documents, past immigration applications, and other materials. Our legal team may also schedule a phone call with you to ask detailed questions about your immigration and life history. 

Going through this process with our legal team can make your first call with the attorney much more helpful in understanding your options. The consultation payment you made generally includes the fees for these conversations with the legal team. 

For potential clients: Before every phone call, please make sure you are in a private space, with no one else present (family members, employers, customers, etc.), so that you can have a confidential conversation with the legal team. 

It is important to provide honest and complete information to our legal team – even if it seems that the questions might not apply to you – so that the attorney can later have all the information available to recommend what immigration remedy would be best for you. Several of our team members can speak English, Spanish, Hindi/Urdu, Gujarati, Croatian, and other languages.

Full Screening for T visa, U visa, VAWA, and other applications: For some kinds of cases, you may have more calls with our screening team who gather information the attorneys may need to review the immigration options.

For a full screening, you can expect to spend three or more hours speaking to a member of our trained Screening Team. This means several phone calls may need to be scheduled in the weeks leading up to your appointment with the attorney. These team members may ask detailed questions about your life, including your family, your immigration history, your work history, and any criminal offenses. The consultation payment includes the fees for these conversations with our team before the attorney consult. The Screening Team decides how many calls are needed to get all the information that is needed to prepare for the attorney consult.

Step 3: Attorney Call: The team provides the attorney with all the information and documents you gave during the intake process. On the date of your consultation, you will get a call from our office to speak with the attorney and with interpreters as needed. During this call, the attorney can review the information you provided and may be able to give you advice on your options. 

The consultation payment includes the fees for this conversation with the attorney. There may be some other fees for an interpreter if we do not have that language speaker in-house, and we can inform you of that ahead of time.  

Step 4: Contract and Hiring (Payment): If you are eligible for any immigration remedies and it seems like this will be a good fit in terms of an attorney-client relationship, then after the consultation, the attorney may instruct the team to prepare a legal fee agreement (contract) for you to review.

The contract will be sent to you to review. The contract gives the cost for the legal work, an estimate of the government fees, and other expenses the potential client can expect to pay for the case, estimated to the best of our ability.  

For most contracts, a staff member may call the potential client to go over the contract with you in a language that is comfortable for them. It is very important for the potential client to participate in this contract review phone call with our staff if one is offered to them, so that they can be sure to understand everything before they sign and pay for us to begin work.  

The contract may have a deadline by which the potential client must sign and pay in order to avoid having to go through the paid consultation process again. In most cases, there is a 90-day period during which the fee quote for a case may remain valid. A discount may be offered to those who decide to hire early. In some limited cases, payment plans may be available.  

If you cannot afford our legal fees, we may be able to provide a referral to a pro bono (free or low cost) agency. 

Step 5: Work Begins: If the potential client decides that they would like to hire us, our work usually begins after the potential client signs the contract and makes an initial payment.

Our team may then take the potential client through a more extensive process of reviewing or requesting documents that we may need for the case, completing data entry, drafting the application, revising it, and finalizing it for signature.  

The potential client can expect to hear from many members of our legal team several times during this process. Please remember that we cannot prepare the application without the applicant’s complete cooperation, so it is essential that you are responsive to our team and provide us with all the information and documentation we ask for in a timely manner. 

Step 6: Filing, Waiting, and Next Steps: Each application is unique and can take a different amount of time to prepare. After an application is filed with the appropriate agency or agencies, it can take anywhere from several months to several years for the agency to make a decision on your application. We can let you know about the status of your application, any updates to the law, and other information that you will need to know as you wait for the decision.  

An annual consultation, with a fee, may be needed for cases that take longer or need a closer look. 

An attorney cannot promise what the result will be on an application.  

An attorney cannot guarantee that an application will be approved by the agency making the decision. 

Once a decision is made – whether it is an approval or denial – we may offer you another meeting to understand the next steps.  

Our mailing address is:

Helen Tarokic Law, PLLC

6752 Rock Spring Road

Suite 110

Wilmington, NC 28405

We highly recommend that when you mail us something, please choose a method that allows you and us to track your mailing. Many mailing options allow you to get a tracking number – US Postal Service, FedEx, DHL, UPS, etc.

When you send us something, it is best for you to call our office or send one of our team members an email to let us know what you have sent, as well as the tracking number.

At Helen Tarokic Law, we generally limit our practice to immigration law. For example, we will not provide any legal advice or work on writing a will, helping you draft business contracts, representing you in a divorce, nor do we provide criminal defense.

If any of these things intersect with your immigration status (such as getting divorced, getting arrested, etc.), we may be able to inform you of how it affects your immigration status and options. We may also recommend that you speak with an attorney licensed to advise you in your state. 

We will also be working only on the issues that have been agreed upon in our contract. If other immigration issues arise that require time and effort from our team, you may reach out to learn your options, or our team may contact you with additional proposed contracts or requests for new legal fee payments.  

This is to maintain our ethical duty to you, to preserve our team’s ability to serve all clients, and because our contracts limit the scope of representation to specific matters. 

What is attorney-client confidentiality? Attorney-Client confidentiality is a legally protected relationship between attorneys and those they serve where all conversations, information, and documents exchanged are a secret subject to the rules of professional responsibility. The secrecy and privacy have to be maintained by the client as well as the legal team. 

Before scheduling and having any call with the legal team, make sure that you can be in a safe and private space such that no one else can hear our conversation. From the attorney’s side, no member of our team is allowed to discuss your case with anyone outside our office without your permission. 

You may also get emails from our team with a subject line that has the words “Confidential Communication” or “Confidential legal correspondence” or “Confidential and Privileged” – or something similar. This is a signal to you to keep this email and all information in it safe and private. 

Can my family member be on the phone calls with me? We understand that clients may want a family member on the call with them to help them understand the conversation or make important decisions together. Sometimes, family members who pay for the legal costs may think they should be a part of the attorney-client calls.  

However, there are many reasons (including attorney-client confidentiality) why the legal team needs to speak ONLY with the client or potential client alone, at least for the first consultation and for many other meetings in the future.

Family members – please do not be alarmed or offended simply because we do not include you in a consultation. Please be understanding. Our office enforces this rule strictly.

Be in a private space – before every phone call, please make sure you are in a private space, with no one else present (family, friends, employers, customers, etc.), so that you can have a confidential conversation with your legal team.  

We have in-house interpreters available to help the potential client understand what the attorney says (in English, Spanish, Croatian, Hindi, Urdu, and Gujarati. Other languages may require additional interpreter fees).  

An attorney can never promise what the result will be on an application. An attorney can never guarantee that an immigration application will be approved by the agency making the decision. 

We also cannot predict exactly how long it will take for the agency to make a decision on the case. We can sometimes provide an estimate based on what we have seen with other such immigration applications. We stay in communication with the applicant, and the applicant can ask if they have questions. 

How long will it take for us to work on and file the case? We also cannot predict that exactly, since it depends on many factors (including the complexity of the case and the applicant’s cooperation), but we work as efficiently as possible to serve all of our clients’ needs. How fast and accurately we work depends partly on the applicant’s full and honest cooperation. There are many things the potential client, client, or applicant can do to make sure that the work goes as smoothly as possible: 

1. Cooperate with all members of our legal team. Be polite and courteous. Ask questions.

Everyone in our office works together as a team, and we communicate to make sure your casework is properly moving forward. You may receive emails or phone calls from many different team members throughout the process – they are all being directed to work with you by your attorneys. Please treat all our staff with courtesy, just as we will do with you. It is always okay to ask questions – we want you to be fully informed about your case.  

For some cases, your attorney may also direct you to contact someone outside of our law firm, such as a therapist, social worker, medical providers, accountants, Trafficking Victim Assistance Program (TVAP) staff, or others. This may all be part of the strategy for the legal case, and it is essential that you provide your full and honest cooperation with these people as well.  

2. Meet deadlines and stay in communication.

Everyone’s time is valuable – yours and ours. We work hard to serve you in a timely manner, especially keeping in mind timelines or deadlines your case may require. We also must work ethically to make sure we are serving all the clients who are seeking our help.  

Please do your part to help the process go smoothly by:

• Being available on time for phone calls with our legal team.
• Being courteous, respectful, and responsive to any team member who calls or emails you.
• Read all emails and materials that we send you and follow the instructions we give you. Ask us as soon as possible if you have any questions.
• Responding to emails, voice messages, and any other messages from our team as quickly as possible.
• When we ask for documents or information, provide it as soon as you can, by the deadline we have set for you.

3. Tell the complete truth to the legal team.

The legal team cannot prepare the application without the potential client/applicant’s complete honesty.  

This means that our team may ask a lot of questions and we need the potential client/applicant to tell the truth. 

If the applicant forgets to tell us something, they can let us know they need to correct something they said or left out by mistake. Our legal team may repeat questions in different ways and at different times to make sure the applicant understands the questions and has had a chance to think back on their history. 

The applicant’s job is to do their absolute best to be honest and cooperative with our team in a timely manner. Delaying providing the requested information can delay the application and it might even block the applicant from the remedy entirely. 

Lying on an immigration application – or intentionally leaving important information out – can not only cause that application to be denied but could also result in serious negative immigration consequences. For this reason, we ask potential clients and clients to be truthful and to listen carefully to questions, so that we can avoid problems with the law.

How to check case processing times: After an application is filed with USCIS, the agency should usually send a Receipt Notice, which states which Field Office or Service Center is processing the application. 

The USCIS website has information to check estimated processing time. https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/.

USCIS says on its Processing Times website that the estimate they give is based on how long it took them to adjudicate 80% of the cases they received in the past six months. They also say what all applicants should understand – “Each case is unique, and some cases may take longer than others. Processing times should be used as a reference point, not an absolute measure of how long your case will take to complete.”  

How to check your case status on a specific application: https://egov.uscis.gov/

For some applications (but not all), the Receipt Number on the Receipt Notice can be used to check the status of the case. The case status check may give a short summary of the last step the agency took in reviewing the application – for example, that they sent Receipt Notice, or that they sent a Request for Evidence.  

Please note: Because of the privacy protections for certain visas, NOT ALL Immigration applications can be checked using the online case status look up. For example, for a T-1, U-1, or VAWA application – these applicants may not be able to see the status of that primary application. For U Visas and T Visas, the U-1 or T-1 applicant may be able to check the case status using the I-765 receipt notice for any Derivatives they also applied for (spouse, children). An attorney may be able to provide more advice on how to check case status for one of these humanitarian remedies. 

Useful USCIS links about checking processing times and case status:

• More information about Case Processing Times – https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/more-info
  • Includes how to read a Receipt Notice to find the important information you need to check your case status
• Check your Case Status online – https://egov.uscis.gov/
• Check estimated processing times for your kind of application – https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/.