Some attorneys will tell a client exactly what they want to hear. Taylor Gillhamer would rather tell them the truth, even when the truth is the last thing they want to hear.

"I'm not going to take your money to get you deported," she says, describing the conversations she has had to have with people sitting across from her, frightened and desperate for a way to stay in the country they call home. Sometimes the most honest advice she can give is the hardest: that filing anything at all would be a mistake. "It's just too risky at this moment."

It is not the line you expect from someone whose job, on paper, is to file cases. But it captures something essential about how Gillhamer practices immigration law, and about the long, winding road that brought her to it.

A Calling That Took the Long Way Around for Taylor Gillhamer

Gillhamer did not set out to become an immigration attorney. For a while, she did not plan to become an attorney at all.

At the University of Georgia, she started in international studies, drawn by a desire to work in the public service sector as a foreign service officer. She also studied romance languages, with an emphasis on French and Spanish, simply because of a lifelong love and appreciation for different languages and cultures. When the international studies coursework stopped lighting her up, she switched her focus to sociology and set her sights on a master's in social work. The plan felt right, until her senior year, when doubt crept in.

"I don't know if I can really make a difference if I go into social work," she remembers thinking. "It seems like just kind of perpetuating this cycle of poverty and injustice."

What never wavered was the impulse underneath all of it. "What I always knew I wanted to do was to help people," she says. "I know all attorneys say that, but I really meant it." So she started studying for the LSAT.

Finding Immigration Law at the 11th Circuit

When Gillhamer arrived at the University of Oregon School of Law, immigration was not even on the menu. "There was not even a single course on immigration law," she says. She specialized instead in family law, drawn to work with survivors of domestic violence. The pull was personal. She is a survivor herself. A summer at the Legal Aid Society of San Diego, working in a domestic violence clinic, put her alongside many clients from immigrant communities and gave her a first real glimpse of the world she would eventually make her own, though she had not yet connected the dots.

The dots connected after graduation, when she joined the staff attorney's office of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Immigration appeals out of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida crossed her desk constantly: asylum claims, cancellation of removal, the thorny territory where criminal law and immigration law overlap. "That's when I kind of fell in love with it," she says. The work fused the humanitarian instinct that had drawn her to family law with the part of the job she calls her genuine passion, legal research and writing.

It also showed her something that unsettled her. Reading through record after record, she kept noticing the same gap: a real shortage of strong representation for immigrants. "It's really not great briefs, not great evidence presented," she says. "I just saw that there was this need for really good attorneys in the field." So she decided to become one.

The road from that decision was anything but straight. A year in removal defense left her completely burned out, even under a friendlier administration. "I really commend anybody in that space," she says, recalling how heavy the work was, emotionally and physically. She returned to family law for a stretch, then to a large national firm handling VAWA and T visa cases, before finally landing at her current firm, where she now focuses on family based immigration alongside humanitarian work, from I-130 petitions to naturalization and DACA.

For the first time, every piece of her winding path fit together. "This really feels like the right fit for me," she says, "because it really combines that family law aspect that I love with immigration law." There is also the simple satisfaction of winning. After being in a corner of the field where even your best work often ends in a loss, she now helps secure green cards for clients almost every day. The cases she enjoys most are not always the most complex ones. She has a soft spot for K-1 fiancé visas, where the human stories tend to be the most surprising. "How did you guys even become a thing?" she laughs, describing couples from completely different walks of life.

Why Taylor Gillhamer Believes Ethics Comes First

If there is a single idea that defines how Gillhamer practices, it is one her boss repeats often: "Do it right, sleep at night."

At her current firm, that philosophy is not a slogan on a wall. It is an operating rule. The firm prioritizes ethics and client safety above all else, which means it turns away cases it does not believe it can win. Every prospective client has the chance to speak directly with an attorney before signing anything, and Gillhamer or her managing partner will tell people honestly when filing is too dangerous.

That selectivity is the real engine behind the firm's roughly 98% approval rate. "We typically don't take cases that we don't think will have at least a good chance of winning," she says. When the firm does take on a long shot, it is only after the client fully understands the odds and knowingly accepts the risk.

Gillhamer is candid about why this matters so much to her, and about why she left a previous firm to find it. In that earlier role, she says, the approval rate sat closer to 60%, and the difference came down to a choice the firm had made: profit over quality. It is a pattern she sees across the field and finds deeply troubling. Prospective clients tell her, almost daily, that a previous attorney ghosted them, never explained what had been filed on their behalf, or took their money and never filed at all.

Her sharpest concern is reserved for the operators, some attorneys, some not even licensed, who push humanitarian filings at volume without ever sitting down for a genuine consultation. A few years ago, she notes, the stakes of a denial were lower. Today they are not. A denied application is now more likely to trigger removal proceedings, even absent any criminal history. Guarantees of protection that some firms still offer, she says, are simply not true. "There's a lot of immigration attorneys out there that are honestly doing a huge disservice to the immigrant population," she says, "preying on them." And she has watched it intensify precisely as people grow more frightened and more vulnerable.

Taylor Gillhamer on AI in Immigration Law: "A Skill That Needs to Be Taught"

Gillhamer is no technophobe. Her firm leans on AI tools daily, and she has become a power user. But her assessment is clear-eyed, and it comes with a warning.

For the heart of legal work, she is not convinced the technology is ready. Ask it a legal question or have it draft a brief, and the results disappoint. "I find a lot of hallucinations," she says. The deeper problem is not that AI gets things wrong. It is the confidence with which it does. "It makes them up in such a confident way that it's really scary."

That is why she insists AI use is a discipline, not a shortcut. "Using AI is a skill," she says, "that needs to be taught." Handing the technology to staff without training, she argues, is "like giving the nuclear codes to a toddler." A paralegal who relays an AI answer to a supervising attorney will deliver it just as confidently as the machine did, and a busy attorney has to remember never to take that confidence at face value.

So Gillhamer is building a training program around exactly that. She collected real examples of the technology going wrong, screenshots of invented case law and shaky reasoning, and turned them into a training session for the legal team. She teaches staff to push back, to demand sources, and crucially to actually click through and verify those sources rather than trust that a citation is real. Notably, the firm restricts these tools to its legal team and keeps them away from intake staff, to avoid any risk of unlicensed legal advice slipping through.

Where the technology genuinely shines, in her experience, is the manual work that surrounds legal practice rather than the practice itself: summarizing information, pulling figures from spreadsheets, reconciling deadlines, and turning her raw call notes into a coherent consultation summary. Used carefully, and always double-checked, it speeds things up.

She is also watching the technology reshape client expectations. People now arrive having already consulted AI, sometimes arriving ready to argue the law with her. They have less patience for the weeks a case genuinely takes. That shift, she believes, is permanent. But it does not change her bottom line. AI, she says, "is certainly not ready to replace an attorney by any means."

A Duty That Has Never Mattered More

Ask Gillhamer what she most wants other people in her field to hear, and she does not reach for anything about technology or efficiency. She reaches for accountability.

Immigration attorneys are under intense scrutiny right now, she acknowledges, and she has no interest in adding to the pile-on. There are, she is quick to say, many excellent attorneys doing this work with integrity. But that scrutiny, she argues, is also a reason to hold one another to a higher standard.

"Life in the United States has never been easy for immigrants, no matter the administration," she says. What has changed is the margin for error. The consequences of a careless filing now fall harder, and faster, on the people least able to absorb them.

That is the thread running through Taylor Gillhamer's entire path. The job was never just to file. It was to help, and to do it honestly. "We have even more of a duty now as immigration attorneys to make sure we're practicing ethically," she says.

It is, in the end, a quieter version of the promise she made to herself in college. She wanted to help people, and she meant it.