James Pittman: Welcome to immigration uncovered, the Docket Wise video podcast where we dive deep into the dynamic world of immigration law with the latest developments, cutting edge practice management strategies, and the transformative impact of legal technology. I'm James Pittman, and today my special guest partly needs an introduction. It's Greg Sisken, and Greg is certainly one of the best known immigration lawyers in America. He's really been a leading light in the field for a very long time, certainly longer than I've been in it. And Greg is the founding partner of Sisken Susser. He is also the co founder of Visalaw AI and of Impact litigation and is also involved in a number of global initiatives as well around immigration law. Greg, welcome.

Greg Siskind: Thank you. Nice to be here.

James Pittman: Thanks for joining us here at immigration uncovered, Greg, so, I mean, just to introduce all of our audience to you, I mean, certainly immigration lawyers who've been around for any length of time know of you, but can you share some of your initial motivation in getting into immigration law? I mean, way back when you go back to the 1990s, you were the first immigration lawyer who really built out a full website and used that in your business. You were one of the first to take up blogging. I mean, what got you into this specific niche of the law?

Greg Siskind: Well, first of all, they didn't teach it at my law school, which is not that unusual for people who graduated around my era. And I think there are still a number of law schools who really don't. They either have it every two or three years they'll teach it, or it's a two credit course every once in a while. They don't really give it the same attention that they give other practice areas. So it was not on my radar when I was in law school, I was interested in international law and accidentally, I guess, wrote a paper on the subject when I was a third year law student, had an independent study where I was just doing a research project and writing a paper for a professor. And I had taken this professor for international trade law and previously, and so I wrote this paper about the integration of the european legal profession. And this was in 1990 that I was working on this paper. And history buffs may remember that in 1992, that was a very big year for the history of the European Community, and they actually changed their name to the European Union and they had much, much tighter integration that was going to be happening at, that was when the euro was becoming a thing. And I wrote my paper about how lawyers moved from country to country in Europe and how sort of the opening, the premise was, it was easier for a german lawyer to practice in France than a Tennessee lawyer to practice in Alabama. And I didn't think of that as an immigration topic. But when I got into my first job, which was working in a corporate law firm working on murders and acquisitions, something completely different, I had taken that paper and I sent it away for publication, and the ABA's international law section published it in their international lawyer journal. Anyway, that was seen by one of the partners at the big firm that I was at who should, you should try out immigration law. And it's like, you're okay on there. I still didn't know have any sort of get the connection between what I had done in that paper, but the firm sent me a couple of immigration matters, which this was in Nashville, Tennessee. They had nobody that was doing any immigration, so I had to figure it out for myself. And once I started working on it, I realized it's like, this is way better and more interesting than the work that I was doing, which frankly, I was getting bored on there. And I was already thinking about grad school.

James Pittman: I have to ask you this. So Tennessee is not the first place that pops into mind. I love Tennessee, by the way, but it's not the first place that pops into mind when you talk about immigrants and an immigrant community. I mean, I think it's more that way. Why did you stay in Tennessee?

Greg Siskind: When I was in law school, by the time I was a third year law student, I was already planning my exit from the legal profession, that I was not going to be in law very long. So I figured I might as well just go back to a place I loved. I went to college in Nashville. I grew up in Florida, but I went to college in Nashville. I had friends there and I just figured it's like I should just go back to there, kind of sort my brain out and figure out what I wanted to get into. And I needed to earn a living and pay back student loans. So I went with a large law firm and that's how I ended up there. But why I stayed, because immigration is a federal practice area. We filed everything by mail and you could have a national practice. Now. At the time, I was also starting to get interested in the Internet back in the early ninety s, and I had already had a couple of different Internet accounts. There was no world wide web yet to speak of. When I started getting into it, it was just Messagenet news groups, which were message boards, email and such. So I knew that the people that had Internet access in 1991, 92, 93, when I was getting into it were university students and faculty and people in university towns and high tech. And both of those seemed like they would be prime markets for an online lawyer and to be able to, since everything we could do could be done from out of town anyway. So they kind of played immigration, being a federal practice area that's mostly back 35 years ago or 30 years ago, could be done remotely. That made a lot of sense for me just to be where I wanted to be as opposed to having to move to a place where necessarily there was a big immigrant community. And as it turns out, Nashville and Memphis, where I've lived for a long time, have a pretty substantial immigrant populations.

James Pittman: Yeah. Nowadays, certainly nowadays, Nashville as a city especially, has grown tremendously. Time and its immigrant populations really increased a lot.

Greg Siskind: Yeah.

James Pittman: Well, I mean, you've done so much related to the Internet and tech and immigration law, and you're presently one of your, I mean, maybe your biggest project right now, or one of your biggest projects is Visa law AI, which is your platform that you very recently launched. Tell us about Visa law AI, and can you talk about features and capabilities of the platform? Your AI product is called Gen, or actually got three aspects of it. Right. Gen, engage and draft. Let's talk about it.

Greg Siskind: Gen is the big one right now, and that's the one that just launched. So it is AI sandbox, I guess, as it were. And by that, I mean it has a number of different capabilities, and it doesn't just do one thing. So the biggest one, probably as far as being unique, is it's the immigration law library that we have in Gen. So we have a collaboration with the American Immigration Lawyers association, and it's really exciting to be working with them because we not only have all the primary law and everything like that, that anybody with diligence can access those materials, generally online or elsewhere. We have a number of books and other resources that are coming from Ayla, as well as a publishing house. This is another business aside from the ones that I think we're going to talk about. But also there's a publisher called Allen House, which is also a spinoff from the law firm, which has four books, some of which are sold on the ALA bookstore and some of them are sold on Amazon. So we have those books. We have the immigration cookbook, which is the big, that's the 3800 page systems manual that Ari sour and I co author that Ayla publishes. And then we have a lot of Aila's best books that they've featured in there. And then this is actually just before this, we were sort of working on a call. We're going to be adding in hundreds and hundreds of Aila practice pointers, liaison minutes, and other materials that are currently on AlA. What used to be called Aila Infonet is now just the Aila library to jen as well, which will allow us to get, I mean, what's great about it is that right now, with all those books, you can really get into sort of the weeds questions that you ask of it. But once we get all those practice pointers, it's really going to make it possible to get into a lot more of that for very current, very specific questions that are not going to be found any answers anywhere else. But that's one part of Jan is this law library, and we have probably 100,000 pages of materials that are in that law library right now. And you can ask basically questions, but it's not just asking questions to get answers to legal questions. You can say, make me a U visa checklist, or make me a flowchart or a process flow for this particular kind of case. Or compare these two concepts and ask it to give you an explanation of what the difference is between an L one visa and eb one C I 140 based green card, for example. You can ask it for that, and you can sort of have a conversation like you can with chat GBT, but you ask your first law question, and then you can say, okay, turn this into a client memo that I can send out in an email. Basically, I tell people to think of it the way you would if you had an associate that you gave a task to. You say, first find me the answer on this question. It's like, okay, they give you a nice little memo with the answer to the question, with citations, which you don't get on Chat GPT. And obviously it's with a closed library, but you get citations lurbs from each source, so you know what it was pulling out of there that was important, and then a link to see the preview document, to see in a preview window the PDF at the page number that it was using for that particular citation. So very easy to check whether you check your work, which is a big issue with generative AI, is lawyers who are just relying on what the AI says and not actually going back and doing the work. So this makes it very easy for you could trust the document, but then you can verify, as Ronald Reagan used to say on, you know, that's one aspect of Gen is the ability to interact with this library. The second thing it does is it has something called document Q and a, and with document Q and A, you can upload any documents you want, and size is not an issue. So maybe you filed a FOIA request and you got a large document back from the government with a lot of materials in it. And you want to find out. We have this in our mass litigation. For example, we may get like six 7800 pages or thousands of pages potentially in a FOIA response. And it's like finding a needle in a haystack sometimes when you're trying to find precisely what you're looking for. But in Jen, if you upload it, you can start basically having a conversation with the document where you start saying, okay, find me all the references in here that talk about this subject, or find these particular kinds of documents in there for me, instead of having to sift through the whole thing yourself. You could do that, or you could just say, summarize this for me, or give me a table of contents of everything that's in here. You can do that kind of stuff. So I can see why that would be really useful. We also have the ability to design your own prompts so you can do, like, one that we've just started with playing with is RFE analysis, where you can upload an RFE, and then you can ask it. First, give me a summary. Give me list out all the evidence that it's asking for. Give me potential arguments to the RFB ideas of things that I can argue in response to these arguments. You can ask it to do all those kinds of things with the document that you've uploaded and custom design your own prompts, or use the ones that we provide on there. So that's one of the things we're trying to do every week, is add new use cases and new prompts so users can interact with it. Third thing that we have is summarization. Summarization is what it sounds like. You upload a document, but one of the nice things about it is, say, you upload the h one B rule that came out a couple of weeks ago or a couple of months ago now. And it's a 225 page proposed rule that you don't have time to read the whole thing. You could tell it, just give me, like a one page summary, which is probably not enough, that's too inadequate. You can say, give me an exhaustive summary of page by page, give me a summary of what's on each page of that. Or you can say, give it to me in chunks where it just summarize page one to five and first chunk summarize in five page increments or whatever you set it to, you have the dial. Basically, you can control about how much detail you're getting. So if you just want to get like a 20 page summary of a 270 page document, you could do that. Or you can get one that's like, get one that's going to be 70, 80 pages. It just depends on how much time you have to read and how much detail you want. So it does that. But another thing that's kind of cool that it does is that you can put a foreign language document into the summarization, and it'll summarize it for you in English. So if you're dealing with a lot of foreign language documents in your practice, and you don't want to have to have them sent out for translation before you figure out whether they're going to be useful to you or not, you can use the summarization capability and then say, okay, these five documents are the ones I'm going to have my client pay for, to have certified translations, now that I know what they're about on there. So that's summarization. Sometime, hopefully over the next month, one of the upgrades we're going to be making is full translation, which will give you, if you want to see the whole document translated. And then we will hopefully have a link to push that off to a translator for certified translation of a document that's largely already been translated. And hopefully the translation company, the one we're talking to, hopefully will be able to give a better price for certification, because the AI has already done a lot of the heavy lifting, and all they're doing is verifying the AI's translation and then certifying it. So that's the third thing, and the last thing it does is something called private GPT. Private GPT solves a problem that is in Chat GPT and Bard and some of the other language models right now, where these public models, you ask questions, it's sharing data with the, it's helping to train the language model from the answers. And also there are human quality control people that are looking at some of the answers, or if some word is flagged or something like that in an answer, somebody might look at it. But you can't put confidential data into those systems without potentially violating our ethics rules as attorneys. So with private GPT, you get the functionality, and we're using OpenAI's GPT four model. So it's really the sort of, I think it's still the best model out there, and all the information flows in from Chat GPT, but there's basically a privacy wall through the API that prevents any client information from flowing back to train the model received by human. So everything stays within Gen, and you can use it ethically to do things that you wouldn't previously able to do with Chas ept. So that's the product, I guess, a little more than a right.

James Pittman: And that's, that's all gen. That's all.

Greg Siskind: You can, and you can do what we call light drafting in gen right now, where you can ask it to give you a simple document for you. What draft is going to be. We're already testing draft right now on a couple of different tasks, but that is a much more sophisticated drafting tool that will essentially we build out an interview with the lawyer where we have a. So I'll give you an example. The first one we've done, and I did a demo for lawyers for this, I think, at the AL conference in October. But we actually changed, I mean, we've actually added a lot more capability to it since then. But it was for ones and one petition letters are one of the more complex types of documents that we draft. It's typically 15 to 20 page letter that we're sending. Immigration lawyers listening to this know that's what that's about. But what we built is a tool where we ask a lot of questions to the lawyer about what that document is going to look like, whether they're an artist, an athlete, which evidence category is going to be used. We ask them to upload critical documents, like the resume of the person who's the one about support letters. If they have them already available, upload them. We actually have a part of it that can help generate the support letters. If you want the tool to be used for that, and then Google Scholar data and anything else you want to awards articles, journal articles, any of the supporting documents you want, you can upload into the app. And we have it trained on templates for different categories. But basically what it will do is it generates a series of prompts.

James Pittman: And.

Greg Siskind: Then will produce a draft text of each section of a document. The lawyer will then make changes that they want in that section. Those changes will further inform, you know, they will further inform throughout the document. So you make a change in one section, you're not going to have to change it in every section. The next prompt that you're going to get is already going to reflect those changes. If you make a change a later prompt, it will go back and fix it in the first one and let you make changes, but then it will just produce a lovely first draft document of what you're trying to do with all the pull quotes from the different documents you want. It will have all the tabs listed for the documents that you uploaded that are going to be in there, and it'll turn into an eight to 15 hours drafting process into something that's less than an hour. So we're pretty excited about that. And it's just very labor intensive on the development side of things to make that. But that is something that we're using at Sysconsuser right now, and it's pretty cool. So that's the kind of thing that we're doing in draft.

James Pittman: Did you pilot it at Sysconsuser first before actually creating the platform to offer to the public?

Greg Siskind: Yeah. So Sysconsuser is essentially the lab for a lot of what we're doing and a lot of the things that way, before others are using it. The lawyers and the paralegals and staff at the firm are playing with and giving feedback, and a lot of the lawyers and staff have been involved in coming up with the ideas and actually generate and developing the absence and the tools themselves. So it's a good fit to have a law firm that's sort of at the center of this development.

James Pittman: Absolutely.

James Pittman: Let's broaden the discussion a little bit, because it's so fascinating, and I know that you're over the moon with the whole AI revolution, but broadening it out from the very important aspect of lawyers getting their work done as efficiently as possible. Thoughts on the broader impacts of AI? I mean, have you done some thinking about the potential to improve access to justice or about the potential for AI adjudication? Those are two kind of society wide aspects that I'm very interested in.

Greg Siskind: Yeah, I mean, definitely there's a lot of discussion across the entire legal profession about what the impact this is going to have on the practice of law. There are a lot of, especially as the technology gets even better and better, there's going to be a lot of tasks that can be delegated to AI versus to. And I think a lot of that's starting with sort of the more tedious tasks, things that have to be done in terms of not just what immigration lawyers do. Any practice area has that. And I think like a lot of technologies in the past, people said they were going to replace this or replace that. There will be functions and things that get replaced that we do, and it may have a big impact on pricing as well. So I think there will be plenty of work for lawyers because there's way more work than lawyers have been able to handle. And certainly even if they've been able to handle it, they haven't been able to price correctly where they can meet the market need. So I think that AI may be a way to correct that problem. There already are a lot of initiatives right now that access to justice initiatives involving legal technology and AI will do that. I think it's going to have a big impact on regulation of legal profession because I think that there will be sort of a pushback by some that don't want tasks to be unauthorized practice law issues and a bunch of other issues that come up when you talk about AI and what role a lawyer has in the process of handling legal work. So there's going to be, I think, a lot of back and forth state bars are going to have to make a lot of decisions regarding regulation. But I am optimistic that there's a lot of low hanging fruit where a lot of work that doesn't get done right now because lawyers just don't see it either, can't price in a way that the lawyer can make a living doing that kind of work, that the AI products might be a solution there where lawyers are able to do a lot more work for the same amount of time and be able to potentially price work a lot lower than they do right now because it just takes a lot less time to do it. And there's probably sort of a combination of lawyers that are able to lower their prices while at the same time increase their profitability. Because the AI, if it's really good, should make it possible for people to be able to churn out a lot more work, but still make more money than they would if they were doing it manually. So, yes, I think that that's a big thing.

Greg Siskind: I think as far as adjudications, it's interesting, I've done some talks at some international organization events on that topic recently about AI is the adjudicator and whether that is good. And it's really sort of in the eye of the beholder. It was funny, I was at a panel for the International Bar association on this topic, and there was lawyer from Germany, a lawyer from Netherlands, a lawyer from Canada, Us. I mean, there were like six of us on this panel and another us lawyer who was in the audience. I just looked at him. It's like, how much worse could it be than what we're currently dealing with? I think it was scary to other lawyers in other jurisdictions where I think they have a little bit more faith in the quality of the adjudications that they're getting, or that they're getting adjudications in the first place, where with us we're so backlogged in cases that would be nice to have an AI that could actually sip through, work their way through a backlog quickly.

James Pittman: My understanding just interject was that the AI adjudication actually is being more used in Europe, like for example, in the immigration context. On your asylum claims, on your preliminary determination, your first impression, and obviously some.

Greg Siskind: Of the lawyers are horrified about that, and they should be. It depends, because it's a black box to some extent. You don't know sort of what went into making the decision by the AI. It's machine learning and it's basically changing. There needs to be audit trails available where you can actually see the sequence of decisions, because people have a right to have an understanding of how a decision was made. And if it was made on a basis that was incorrect in the law, you have no way of tracking that if you don't understand what it was. So that's one thing I think will have to be thought through also. There may be certain kinds of processes should not be outsourced to an AI, at least for a while, if they are life and death kind of things like asylum versus an adjudication on a particular. There's like really simple stuff. I mean, one I'd love to see is an AI just completely adjudicate employment authorization documents. It's just a question of verifying that the person has an application pending in the correct category, verifying that the information put into the fields matches what's in the database on there. There's very little that an examiner has to do that you couldn't source out. So there's that kind of stuff. But it is something I think it's going to. There are judges, right? I think it's the UK that just came out with some kind of guidance on judges and AI and how that they can use them in their decisions. So what you may see is a lot of times in different adjudications, where ais can assist a judge like they can assist a lawyer, and hopefully the software that the judges are using will provide citations and we'll do that kind of stuff. I don't have a problem with law clerks and judges and using AI the same way lawyers can to get to a better result. We just have to be really careful right now about AI actually making decisions that have consequence for people without really having any way to understand exactly what just happened.

James Pittman: You're very active in the International Bar association on the immigration committee. Is there an initiative at the IBA to kind of examine how AI is being used in adjudications in different jurisdictions? Is that you mentioned there was a.

Greg Siskind: Panel, IBA is doing a lot of work in that space. Our panel was just on immigration, but the IBA is like, they have, I think, 60,000 members from all over the world in every counterpractice area. So every section of the IBA right now is talking about the same subject. And that's something that we'll start to see more of it. And also what we're going to start to see is regulation coming, really more sophisticated regulation on AI, and legal coming from jurisdiction by jurisdiction. So the European Union is, in some respects, further along, and some respects the US is further along. But I think a lot of jurisdictions are sort of looking to see what this one's doing and what that one's doing as they're making up their minds on it. And some are also rushing probably more quickly than they should without having a real understanding. It concerns me as well. Lawyers need to be an important part of the conversation, and these decisions have to be done carefully. I think in the US, a lot of our ethics rules do a pretty good job of covering a lot of the issues, as do the rules for ethics, for judges, et cetera. It is something that's happening, the conversation that's happening globally as well, at the very local level.

James Pittman: I was going to say, I was talking to Vanderbilt AI law lab on our. Yeah, so they have their pioneering AI law lab. So it's great that you're right there as well. And that's one of the things that we were talking about, was that we have the opportunity for the policy conversation and the regulation conversation to get off on the right foot. And it's really imperative that people do get involved in those conversations. We want to see regulation and policy that is reasonable and shows an understanding of the technology. Some courts have come out. Now, I mean, you obviously know this with requirements that lawyers individually certify every document to state whether it was created using any form of AI. But that can be written very broadly, and that may not be the best way.

Greg Siskind: Grammarly is AI. Spell check is AI. I mean, there's like a ton of AI that goes into just about every document that we produce. We know that's not what these judges are thinking about. They're thinking about the one Chat GPT. But it just shows sort of like why judges in general shouldn't be issuing rules on subjects that they don't understand, or they should at least send them out for comment before they actually just impose a rule and let people give them a little feedback on why they've written it in a way that's just ridiculous. Hopefully we'll see a little bit more thoughtful. But generally speaking, everything that judges are concerned about, they can discipline people under the existing rules that are out there. Like if you're sending in a brief with using chat TPT and it made up citations. Well, I mean, there's rules about supervision on AI. There's rules about competence. There's rules about diligence on there. And they didn't need to have a new rule that they added into the mix to be able to crack down on an issue.

James Pittman: Yes, I mean, the ethical principles are generalized enough that with some opinions, maybe some opinions coming out from various bar associations, that, in effect, could be enough. But it's really imperative that practitioners get involved in the policy discussion so that things go the right way.

James Pittman: But I do want to ask you a question. So the International Bar association, so you, as an immigration lawyer, what advantages do you find from participating in the IBA versus how does it complement sort of Aila? How would it complement someone being active in the Federal Bar association? What, IBA?

Greg Siskind: Yeah. So the IBA, I've been active in it since the 1990s, and I've made really close friends that are immigration lawyers all over the world. But the IBA has an immigration section, and in that immigration section, there are lawyers from a lot of jurisdictions, and they do a number of things. But the big thing that they do are put on panels at the conferences. So the IBA has, they do webinars. The immigration section I'm talking about, they do webinars. They have always four or five panels at the International IBA meeting, and then they have a global biennial immigration conference, which is every two years. And that's actually happened always in London, and it's always the last quarter of the year. So there'll be one this year in December where about 300 immigration lawyers from around the world come and there'll be panels on subjects. I think first, from an intellectual point of view, it's really helpful to hear how different jurisdictions approach different issues that we think in the United States, we're so siloed and we only have our unique set of issues, and other countries aren't dealing with similar issues. But it's quite the opposite, actually. There are a lot of very common themes, and a lot of countries take very different approaches, which is helpful when I'm involved in advocacy, for example, in the US, to have some perspectives on sort of like that there are alternatives to the way our government is doing things. For example, on this question of AI on there, I've heard a lot of interesting things about how other countries are looking at what lawyers are going to be able to do and what they're not going to be able to do. And these are ideas that I could take back here. So you have all of that, but then there's business, obviously, that we all send to each other, which is great. So most of us, as immigration lawyers that are dealing with international companies, for example, our companies are not just bringing people into the US. They're sending people from country B to country C and us citizens to these other countries. And I always have a very easy time figuring out either. I know an IBA member who I've been friends with, and I know these people well because I've seen them over the years. I've referred work to them over the years, and I could also talk to other members about their experiences working with that firm. And if there's not an IBA member that I know from that jurisdiction, I usually can find somebody in that region and know, okay, who is the person in whatever country it is that's around the corner from your country that you would send to? And a lot of us lawyers usually know quite well. So that's really helpful. And it's just something, I think, that brings value to our clients, and it also generates work for us. So it's been a great experience, iba, and I highly recommend it to people.

James Pittman: And we're going to get on to your involvement in able, which is a different organization in a second.

James Pittman: But I do want to ask this question about Twitter. So you, I know, were very active on Twitter. ABC News at one point listed you as one of the top 20 immigration experts on Twitter. I mean, how are you feeling about the platform after the acquisition, after Musk's acquisition? I mean, do you still think it as x, it's worth it for people to be using Twitter to follow immigration? I ask a lot of people this.

Greg Siskind: Yeah, I mean, I have to be like, I'm not as busy on Twitter as I used to be. I still am. I'm on there every day. But I used to sort of think of that as my main platform that I'm using in social media. And my Twitter following, since Musk is still growing, so it's still a good platform with me. I don't know, something like north of 80,000. And there are a lot of journalists that are still on there, and a lot of policymakers are on there. I know that I just had talked to somebody who works high up in the administration, who is an old friend, and this person told me that they occasionally print out my tweets and send them along up there sort of as a heads up about an issue that's coming. And I know that that was, for example, we sued on this big case on Ukrainians and some others where we sort of give a heads up that we're going to pursue a lawsuit on a particular issue if it doesn't get fixed, that kind of stuff. That is more than just random rants. It's actually very specific about something that a consequence that's going to happen. So it's still valuable, mainly because the audience that I'm talking to is still that. I keep hoping that either Elon Musk will get bored with it and just kind of let it actually thrive again, or he'll sell it at some point. Who knows? But I will stay until as long as it's still a useful tool. I have to say, I'm a lot more on LinkedIn now than I was prior to Elon Musk, and that seems to know that community. I thought of LinkedIn in the past just as sort of like the place you posted your resume. And then also basically people would just make sort of pr sounding announcements, and that was fine. But now there's actually more really good conversations that are happening over there, AI in particular, and the legal profession is great over there. Really, a lot of the best people in the thinkers in this field are posting really interesting stuff over there. So LinkedIn is, I don't have as many connections and followers over there, but it's a pretty substantial number, and it's definitely worth my time.

James Pittman: Well, Greg, I got to ask you the question about the election. Let's talk about this. This is so enormous. How did the first Trump administration, what is your global assessment of the impact that that had on the practice of immigration? What are you most concerned about facing the prospect of a second?

Greg Siskind: I mean, obviously, it would depend on whether the first Trump administration, keep in mind, remember that he had won the House and the Senate and the White House, even though the filibuster was still a defense for the Democrats. If he barely captures the presidency and the Democrats are, I mean, there's a decent chance the Democrats could still get the House back and keep the mean. You don't know. So it's like, obviously he can make a lot of mischief just at the executive branch level with the executive orders and all that. Republicans have been really kind of fighting executive powers against the Biden administration and this administration, and they may be regretting it. Well, maybe not. I have a feeling a lot of Republicans probably secretly would like to, if Trump gets elected, would like to see him controlled by the courts a lot more and by Congress a lot more. So I think a lot, there are some differences. One is, I think there may be a question mark about how much Congress constrains them. If the Democrats have control of either house, and then also with the Supreme Court right now is, for example, this case that they just heard yesterday, the chevron. Two, I guess, on there. I forget what the name of the case is, but if the administration loses that, then I think that would make it a lot easier as well. If the Trump administration was trying to know really nefarious things through regulatory processes, that would make it a lot easier. And as I learned during impact litigation started during the Trump administration. That's their mass litigation project that we work on with the cook firm in Atlanta and with Joseph and Hall in Denver and Jesse Bless in Boston. That was a very successful project. It was still ongoing, but in terms of stopping Trump policies, we were able to do a lot in the courts, and that'll ramp up again. It's just that we roll over and accept anything that's coming.

James Pittman: Well, let's talk about impact litigation. So, impact litigation, that's immpac. Litigation is a project, and that is a joint venture between your law firm, Cisco and Sasner, and three other law firms. And it is to initiate lawsuits designed to change laws or policies. So give us a couple of examples.

Greg Siskind: Yeah, there are several. So one that may remember was when the Trump administration had tried to push through a very tough wage rule for labor certifications. And we worked in co counsel with american immigration Law association. We found a number of universities and others to be lead plaintiffs. We filed this case called Purdue versus Scalia. And Gene Scalia was actually a classmate of mine in law school. He was the secretary of labor. And we sued successfully on that issue, and the regulation became history on there. So that's one example is on a particular regulation where we may just sue before that ever even takes effect. We've sued on these cases that are mass mandamus cases, where there's just unacceptable delays and they still work, although they're getting tougher and tougher, because judges have been overwhelmed with litigate with these suits over the years. And rather than just telling the government, it's like, make these go away. They're actually making them go away by dismissing them in a lot of cases, instead of actually addressing the problem of why there's so many news cases that have been filed. But we also, one that I'm particularly proud of was, during the Trump administration, these travel bans that were being issued. We decided to pick one aspect of that and really dig in and challenge, which is travel bans under 212 f bar the entry of people that fit a particular criteria. And what was happening was the administration was barring the issuance of visas, and the visas themselves were not actually covered in 212 f. It just barred entry. So on the travel bans that were based on Covid, they would say, okay, people from these countries cannot travel. People in these countries cannot travel to the US unless they've been out of those countries for at least 14 days. And the administration, both the last administration and the Biden administration took the same position, which is that that means we don't have to issue visas because these people are in these countries and they can't enter, and they have to be eligible to enter the country right now on there. And we would say, well, they could just go to another country for 14 days and then enter from there with the visa that you granted. So it is possible for them to come in. And the first case that we sued on that was the Milligan case. We had nine hundred K one couples that got together and we filed that case, and we won on that issue. And then what happened was that the administration would say, okay, we're going to follow the judge's order and these people all get their visas issued, but we're only applying it to these plaintiffs. And then the, and then they would try basically and ignore it for everybody else. So we took us six lawsuits on suing on that issue. And then with the last one, we had converted into a class action to try and get it to apply to everybody in the country, or they would say, it only applied on that visa category or that kind of thing anyway. So that was a successful, more recently ukrainian case that we've been working on. I'm particularly proud of that one for Ukrainians. They came on, the president set up this parole program, and the parole program is uniting for Ukraine. And it's basically for 100,000 to probably somewhere between 100 and 200,000 Ukrainians will be allowed in on that program. Congress passed a bill separately in May 2022 where they were giving all this money to help arm Ukraine. But there was a little section in that bill that said that Ukrainians that come in under the parole program after the war started, anybody who enters as parolees, they are to be treated for benefits purposes the same as refugees. So I looked at that, and it was like, what kind of immigration benefits do refugees get? And the big one was they get all kinds of. Refugees get all kinds of benefits. They get housing benefits, they get food stamps, they get all those kinds of things. So I called up a couple of people initially who were like, that's what they're talking about. They're talking about those kinds of things, and they're not talking about immigration stuff. I found one provision that was kind of buried really deep in there and said that this language should not be construed to provide any availability of a green card because one of the benefits that a refugee in asylum gets is after one year, they can file for a green card. So they made a reference to an immigration benefit by saying that this particular immigration benefit is not available. And by implication, that means any other immigration benefits are available. Well, there's a big immigration benefit that immigrants that refugees get, which is they get automatic work authorization. So when they step off the airplane, they get to work right away. And they also don't have to pay for employment authorization cards, which is $410. So USCIS was not making any changes to their policies. And I had asked them as early as June. I sent a note to policy person there. It's like, when are you going to start implementing the work authorization provisions for Ukrainians? Why are they still having to apply for eads? Why are they not allowed to work right now? Why are you still charging them for eads? And the answer was, I'll get back with you. And we waited until we send a couple of follow up inquiries, and August rolls around, there's still nothing. And these people want to work on there. I mean, sitting at home every day and watching and watching tv is not therapeutic. So we sued and we filed a suit on behalf of 150 Ukrainians in district court in Chicago. And the government finally admitted, after delaying and delaying the judge, saying that they are working on the issue and they're in settlement talks with us, which was not true. We never actually had any conversations with them. They finally, in November 2022, announced that they were surrendering on that issue and that we were right and that they were going to issue change the policy and provided automatic work authorization and free work cards, but they didn't make it retroactive. So all these people who had spent millions of, collectively millions and millions of dollars, no refunds were being issued to any of those people. So you know what the next thing was, which was we filed another suit to a class action suit to get refunds. And that suit right now, we're right in the middle of that. And that's hopefully something we'll have resolution on soon. But they're going to lose on that issue. UScIS, they already admitted that they violated the law the first go around. So I'm not quite sure what their explanation is of why these people who paid for something that they shouldn't have don't get their money back.

James Pittman: Well, it certainly sounds like impact has made a difference on a lot of those cases. Is it something where you're actively looking for other cases to take on? At the present time, we're looking for.

Greg Siskind: Things that obviously will make a difference for a lot of people. So we're looking for policies that are where the government has, first of all, we're looking for things that are winnable. We don't want to just file on a suits that we're going to lose on. But to the extent we can find issues that we think we can win on and will make a difference for a lot of people. Yeah. So we're evaluating. We're looking also at precedents that are coming out that make certain things that we were thinking about maybe less attractive to us. And we're also looking for things that are not being litigated by other firms out there. There are plenty of fine litigation firms and other groups that are doing great work in that space. So we're not looking necessarily to retread on the issues that they're doing a good job covering. So those are some of the things we think about.

James Pittman: I mean, you're just going to have your hands really full if Trump gets reelected, I think because these plans that have been sort of bandied about in the media and some of the it's, and I hope you'll be able to achieve success, know the changing composition of the federal judiciary, but you're definitely going to have your hands mean, before we talk about able, you're the author of eight books on immigration subjects.

James Pittman: Can you just spotlight a couple of the books and their significance in different subfields in immigration law?

Greg Siskind: Yeah. So one of the books that I put a lot of years into was the J one visa guidebook, which was co written with Steve L. Lair and Bill Stock, two great lawyers. And now Brian Schmidt has actually taken over lead as the lead author on that. And I think we're still listed as co authors, but Brian's doing all the work on it, to be frank. And that book, it was really important for me initially because I wanted to do work for doctors. That was an area I wanted to get into in a big way. And I was in Nashville, where a lot of hospital systems were based and had a little exposure to that and dirty secrets. When I wrote that book, I had no clients in that space. And I figured if I really learned that subject inside and out and created this massive piece of scholarship on this, that I wouldn't have to really explain myself as far as whether I knew, right? So that book, and that was a very large book, my mother used to say, you wrote the telephone pages basically, if you remember those big telephone books, that used to be basically a doorstop. So that book really was great for me as far as being able to give me some credibility early in my career. I think we wrote it at 97, the first edition. And I know Bill and Steve was already pretty established that he didn't need that book to give himself credibility. Bill and I were still pretty young lawyers when that book came out, and so that was really good for us. And then in years later, there were other books that were on particular topics that were of special interest to us. So I did a book on I nine s, and he verified back in nine that first I wrote it for Sherm, the HR manager's organization. And then we wrote a different version of that with Bruce Buchanan, who's a little Mendelsson lawyer. He and I wrote a new version of that, and there's actually a new version of that that's coming out in the next, very soon. I just think we just signed off on the final draft on it very recently. So that was an important, I was really interested in that subject. Jason Susser, who is a co founder with me at Visola and also my law partner in Cisco and Susser, he's one of the best lawyers for startup companies that I know, has a ton of clients in that space and seen every issue. And he and I wrote a book on startup immigration issues for founders, basically. And then obviously the cookbook is the big one. That's the one that is most time consuming for us. But that book I really love because it's the book I wish was available when I began practice, where you really kind of like each chapter is everything you need to do. That kind of case, essentially, for most common types of cases, is in there. And I think it's really great for young lawyers. It's really great for lawyers that want to systemize their practices. And as a guy in case management world, you probably can appreciate that as far as really thinking through project management, which is the book is really good for that as well. And it keeps me up to date on a lot of areas of law where over the years I've done mostly business and employment. But for that book, we have chapters on u visas, we have chapters on humanitarian visas, we have family immigration stuff and all that. So I think it's made me a better immigration lawyer sort of in the general field as opposed to just these niche areas. So I love that book. And also it was sort of like when we wrote it, we also knew that there would be software tie ins. And that book's really helpful for Jen as far as giving it the ability to do all kinds of tasks that would be really hard to do if it wasn't in.

James Pittman: Sussex. Do you maintain a general immigration practice and handle all sorts of cases? Are you really totally sort of like an employment based immigration firm? These things?

Greg Siskind: Cisconcessor is we do family and we do some and humanitarian. We're not doing removal work anymore. We spun that practice out in Lily Axelrod, great lawyer, was with us for several years. She went off on her own and we asked Lily to take over that work from us and manage that as opposed to. So we're not interested in competing. You please take all this work in this space. It's really sort of the core of work is something that economics of that kind of practice are very different. And there's a lot of reasons why it was better not to manage that in our firm. And thankfully, Lily is such an awesome lawyer that we really felt quite comfortable asking our clients to move their work over to really. We don't do that. We don't do adoptions. There's like a few areas that we don't do, but most practice areas, most parts of immigration law we do. We have strengths. I mean, we have a really strong arts and sports practice. We have a really strong I nine practice. We have a really strong startup practice. We have healthcare is obviously a big thing, represent probably hundreds of hospitals and then just general corporate work. So those are all really strong areas for the firm, too.

James Pittman: Fantastic. Greg?

James Pittman: Well, we're at the end of the hour. It's been really fantastic catching up with you. And I know I see you often at the various al events and committees and things, but it's so great to get a chance to just sit down one on one like this and have the hour to discuss. So we're super excited about Visalaw AI and all of the other work that you're doing around AI, it's such a great time for you, I'm sure, because it's kind of really come to full fruition. The different threads that you've been involved in and been a leader in for all these years, it's really coming to fruition now. So I really do appreciate your time today, and we're looking forward to having you back.

Greg Siskind: Thanks, James.

James Pittman: Pretty soon. Thanks, care.

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