Opportunities:

For a successful entrepreneur, L-1 presents a less costly and speedy initial non-immigrant visa road map toward US permanent residency. L-1 is a temporary nonimmigrant status for foreign employees of multinational companies with an office, subsidiary or parent in the U.S. The international entrepreneur usually starts a new office or subsidiary in the U.S. and works his or her way toward U.S. permanent residency following one or more extension request.
The qualifying businesses do not have to be large scale multinational companies. As long as the qualifying relationship, i.e. office, affiliate, subsidiary or parent relationship is satisfied, there is a valid intracompany structure for L-1 purposes.
The qualifying employer may be nonprofit, religious, and charitable organizations, in addition to for-profit multinational companies.
Your dependent spouse and children under 21 can join you in the U.S. and apply for employment authorization document and seek employment in the U.S. job market while you are in L-1 status.

Challenges:

USCIS strictly scrutinizes the business plan associated with the L-1 new company submission and challenges any possible aspect of feasibility of the business operation
USCIS has strict and precise standard for demonstrating the one-out-of-the-three-year employment requirement before filing.
First-line worker’s supervisory experience is excluded as managerial or executive as some petitioners can have somewhat labor-intensive operations that make the duties of a putative manager fall outside of the managerial duties for purposes of the L-1 regulatory compliance.
USCIS made it very clear that an approved L-1 extension does not mean an automatically approved EB1C immigration petition and each case has to be reviewed with independent scrutiny. The recent trend seems to suggest that USCIS liberally issues request for additional evidence for an L-1 extension application even if all prior L-1 extensions have been approved.

Draft highly detailed business plans that dovetails every aspect of the business operation with clear strategies to potentially defend the feasibility of the plan even before USCIS’ challenges arise
Overall initial assessment to ensure compliance with the L-1 regulations and other administrative memos
Adequate explanation of the business necessity and rationale for adopting certain operational practices or methodologies
Pre-submission due diligence and checking to ensure consistency among documents

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