Bob Meltzer on Innovation, Resilience, and Why Immigration Law's Toughest Times Create the Greatest Opportunities
24th October 2025
Date
Interviewee
Bob Meltzer
Bob Meltzer, Founder of VisaNow and Law Firm and Legal Tech Business Coach
The late 1980s found Bob Meltzer spending nearly half his year in China, navigating the complex world of U.S.-China trade agreements. As an international law attorney at a major Chicago firm, he was building a thriving practice helping Chinese companies establish themselves in America. Then came the question that would redirect his entire career.
"My clients were asking me if I could help them with their immigration for their key employees," Meltzer recalls. It was a simple request, but one that would lead to an extraordinary journey through immigration law, legal technology innovation, and ultimately, a complete transformation of how immigration cases could be managed.
The Unlikely Beginning of an Immigration Law Career
Meltzer's entry into immigration law was anything but conventional. His background centered on international trade, treaties, and cross-border agreements. Immigration applications? That was unfamiliar territory. But an earlier case had given him an unexpected foundation.
"I had an opportunity to represent a foreign national in an extradition case. That case was transitioned into a deportation case." His client insisted Meltzer handle the immigration matter too, despite his concerns about lacking expertise. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"It was interesting because I didn't know how to file an H-1B, an immigration application, but I was doing this high-level deportation case in the U.S. Circuit Court and District Court," Meltzer says with evident irony.
So when those Chinese executives started requesting immigration help, something clicked. "I went to my partners at the time and said, I'm referring a lot of this work out to immigration attorneys. We should be doing this work ourselves," he recalls. Their response? "Why don't you run it?"
Then came the words he would later joke about: "I made the mistake of saying, how hard could it be?"
Building an Immigration Practice at a Traditional Law Firm
Meltzer hired an immigration lawyer from a local firm to help build the practice. This decision proved pivotal, not because it gave him expertise, but because it exposed him to how immigration law was traditionally practiced. And what he saw troubled him.
"I didn't know how immigration law was practiced, which was kind of a benefit," he reflects. "Everyone did it a certain way, and I had no idea what that was. But when I saw how slow the process was, the internal process of collecting documents, and going back and forth, I would ask, why do you do it that way?"
The response was always the same: "That's the way we do it."
For Meltzer, this was unacceptable. "I think there's got to be a better way to do it," he remembers thinking.
The Email Epiphany That Changed Everything
The year was 1997. Email had just arrived at the firm. Meltzer was grappling with a familiar problem: a change in H-1B applications meant his entire team would spend the day answering the same question repeatedly on phone calls.
"I actually walked by the offices of the paralegals, and on my way back to my office, they were all on the phone answering this question," he recalls. "I walk into my office, and I open up my email, and I had the same question from a client."
He spent 20 minutes crafting a detailed response and hit send. Almost instantly, another client emailed with the identical question.
"Ridiculously, for a minute there, I thought I had to type it out again," he admits. "Until I realized, wait a minute, all I have to do is copy and paste it." Today that response seems almost ridiculous but given the time-frame it’s more understandable.
That moment of recognition sparked an idea that would become VisaNow. "I went to my associates and I said, here's this idea. People come into a website, they ask the questions, we have a bank of responses, we edit the answers as needed and it saves us an enormous amount of time by reducing redundancy!"
From Law Firm Partner to Full-Time Entrepreneur
VisaNow launched in 1998 with a simple premise: streamline the question-and-answer process that consumed so much time in immigration practice. But companies quickly saw broader potential. "Very soon into it, companies were asking could we use this?"
The growth was explosive. "We grew so quickly that within a year I left my partnership," Meltzer explains. He was a young partner, viewed as future firm leadership, but VisaNow's trajectory demanded full attention.
"Our growth was pretty exponential," he says. The company attracted investors, continued scaling, and by the time Meltzer exited in 2017, VisaNow had grown to over $20 million in revenue with a couple hundred employees.
The Challenge of Selling Technology to Lawyers
Despite VisaNow's success with direct consumers and corporations, Meltzer learned hard lessons about marketing to law firms. "I was considered an enemy by other immigration lawyers," he says candidly. "They were like, this guy's got to go because he's going to take over the market and since he doesn’t practice in a traditional format there must be something wrong with his process that is not consistent with our ethics."
His message to skeptical attorneys was straightforward: "I'm just a competitor. I just do it better. If you want to compete with me, join me and do it better than you're doing it."
At his board's urging, Meltzer spent a year and a half trying to sell VisaNow to immigration lawyers. The experience proved frustrating. "I found that they all do it differently. They all have different nuances in their practice. And not only do they do it differently, but they love the way they do it."
The technology required lawyers to adopt VisaNow's streamlined process, but most weren't willing to change. "I finally went to my board and said, " I give up. I'm not going after the lawyer market anymore. I'm going to stay focused on acquiring end-user clients."
Current Landscape: Opportunities in Restrictive Times
Today, Meltzer coaches law firms and works with the AILA Task Force on the future of immigration law. His perspective on current challenges is refreshingly optimistic.
"The biggest concern we're seeing right now is that people are leaving the United States and fewer people are coming in," he acknowledges. "But it's those moments that create opportunities."
His first recommendation? A mindset shift. "When immigration becomes more restrictive, immigration lawyers are needed even more. When people think they're not going to allow this or that, and it's going to totally curtail the ability to make applications, that's when people really need immigration lawyers."
He's seen dramatic results. "What I'm seeing right now is a huge increase in removals and detentions, which is leading to people turning to habeas corpus and other nuanced remedies," he notes. Lawyers who have embraced these changes are thriving.
His third opportunity area? Consolidation. "Some firms will just close up. They're going to give up," he observes. "The work is out there. The people are out there. If you're hanging in there, you should be able to gain the work that otherwise would have been done by a competitor who's no longer there."
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Immigration Law
On AI's impact, Meltzer is unequivocal: "It's going to change everything. It's going to change every practice, not just immigration."
He sees AI addressing multiple aspects of immigration practice. "I think you guys have come up with a great solution for application assembly and prep," he tells the LegalBridge team. "That's logical. It's going to be interesting to see how you continue to improve it."
But legal production is just one piece. "There's a few more pieces to the client relationship than legal production," he notes. "That would be communicating with the client. I would expect to see some AI communication tools that make it a lot easier."
He's also watching AI's potential in business development. "I've already seen some pretty cool things," he says, describing firms using ChatGPT to build lead lists and virtual AI salespeople to answer phones and schedule consultations.
Why Selling to Lawyers Remains Challenging
Meltzer offers frank insights on why legal technology sales remain difficult. "For the most part, they don't embrace the idea of efficiency," he says. For hourly billing attorneys, efficiency actually threatens revenue. "If you tell them I'm going to make you more efficient, they would question if efficiency would lead to less billable hours and less revenue."
Even with flat-fee immigration work, change resistance persists. "You have to help your potential clients understand that they could charge a very profitable multiple more than they will pay for producing the application."
The Entrepreneur's Perspective
Looking back on his journey from that first H-1B filing to building a $20 million company, Meltzer's insights carry weight. He didn't just practice immigration law; he reimagined how it could be delivered. He didn't just use technology; he pioneered its application to immigration services.
"Faster, cheaper, and easier," he says, was always VisaNow's basic value proposition.
That combination of efficiency and quality remains his north star, whether evaluating new technologies, coaching firms, or assessing industry trends.
For immigration attorneys facing uncertainty, law firms considering technology adoption, or entrepreneurs building the next generation of legal tech, Bob Meltzer's journey offers both inspiration and practical wisdom. Sometimes the best innovations come from those who don't know "how it's always been done" and dare to ask a simple question: "How hard could it be?"
Note: This article is part of LegalBridge Magazine's series featuring leaders in immigration law and global mobility. The interview was conducted in October 2025.