Recently, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has announced its intention to make procedural changes to the labor condition application (LCA) process. An approved LCA document must be received from the DOL before an H-1B petition can be filed with USCIS. Under the new procedures, LCA issuance is expected to take up to 7 days, or possibly longer, to allow the DOL to provide closer scrutiny to applications submitted. This new system is staring on April 15, 2009. We are not aware of the quota situation, we do not think the quota will be filled immediately but it is difficult to predict how long the quota will last.
Because of the above situation, we in our office have decided to file all the cases in the first week of April. If you want to ensure that you case goes out in this time period, it is important that you send us all the cases as soon as possible and no later than March 27th, as we also have to get an educational evaluations in some cases. Case that we receive after that will be filed on a first come first serve basis and we do not guarantee that they will make it for the quota.