IN THIS GUIDE · L1B preparation for a client-site project, where supervision and offsite restrictions need legal review
Start with the L-1B eligibility and application overview
Map the worksites, the client, and the contract
List every place the employee is expected to work, including the client's premises, any company office, and remote arrangements, with the proportion of time at each. Then describe the commercial arrangement: what the company sells the client, what the deliverable is, and how it is priced. A statement of work written for the customer often answers these better than an internal summary, and inconsistencies between the two are worth resolving now.
Set out who directs and controls the work
Describe the reporting line in practice, not only on the organization chart. Who sets the employee's priorities, reviews the work, decides how problems are solved, and handles performance and leave? Where a client project manager influences day-to-day activity, say so plainly rather than describing an arrangement the project's own communications would contradict. Accurate description here is what allows the offsite restrictions to be assessed rather than guessed at.
Keep the company-specific knowledge visible on site
The knowledge argument still has to be made. Show what the employee brings from inside the company — its own methodology, product, tooling, or accumulated implementation practice — and how the client engagement uses it. Work that could be performed by any suitably skilled contractor engaged locally makes a weak record, whatever the contract says. Describe the internal element concretely and connect it to specific parts of the deliverable.
Send the offsite question to counsel early
This is the part of the plan not to work around. The restrictions applying to L1B employees placed at third-party worksites turn on supervision and the nature of the arrangement, and the assessment is fact-specific. Give counsel the contract, the worksite list, and an honest account of supervision before commitments are made to the client. Advisers can organize that material; the legal judgement belongs with a licensed US immigration lawyer.
Let the commercial documents answer the supervision question
Where the employee will work primarily at a third party's premises, two additional conditions apply: the placement must not amount to labour for hire, and the petitioning employer rather than the site owner must retain control and supervision of the work. The instinct is to answer those with a description of the intended arrangement, which is the weakest available evidence, because the client's own paperwork describes the same arrangement and will be read alongside it. So start from the commercial documents instead. The statement of work says what is being bought — a defined deliverable, or a person's time. The pricing schedule says the same thing more bluntly. The project plan names who assigns tasks and who accepts the work. The change-control procedure says who may redirect the effort. Read those four together and the answer is usually plain, and where it is unfavourable the business still has the option of changing the arrangement, which is a real commercial decision available now and unavailable later. What does not help is a role description drafted to sound compliant while sitting alongside an invoice for daily rates. Note also that L-1B stay is capped at five years in total. Hypothetical example: a specialist's engagement is restructured before signature so that the client buys a milestone-based deliverable rather than days, which changes both the commercial risk and the answer to the supervision question.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.