"There are a lot of immigration lawyers who have very compelling stories about what immigration means to them," Matthew Meltzer says. Then he cuts against every one of them. "That's not my story."

It is a disarming way to open an interview, and a revealing one. Meltzer, co-founder of the Chicago business immigration firm Meltzer Hellrung, did not arrive in the field through a family legacy or a courtroom calling. He arrived through geography and a job market that would not cooperate.

How Matthew Meltzer Fell Into Immigration Law

Meltzer graduated from Boston College Law School in 2011. He had been in a long distance relationship with the woman who is now his wife, and when she moved to Chicago for a PhD program at the University of Chicago, he followed her. He had no job waiting for him. Despite what he describes as relentless networking, none materialized for months.

The first offer he landed was at an immigration law firm, a company then called VISANOW and known today as Envoy. That was the whole of the origin story. No grand mission, just a door that happened to open.

What is striking is how little he dresses it up. There is no retrofitted destiny here, and that honesty turns out to be the through line of everything that follows. Meltzer is a builder who prefers to see things exactly as they are, and then decide what to do about them.

Why He Left a Burnout Culture to Build His Own Firm

By 2014, Meltzer and his eventual partner, Matthew Hellrung, had both spent formative years at that first firm. They started there six weeks apart, which means, as Meltzer puts it, they have logged only about six weeks of their entire legal careers not working alongside each other.

He is generous and clear-eyed about that early employer at the same time. It was, he admits, a place that burned people out and gave young attorneys far more than they were ready to handle. It was also, precisely because of that, an extraordinary training ground.

"I had gotten just a tremendous opportunity to handle a large caseload and interact with clients in a way that, honestly, I did not deserve," he says. He made mistakes in those years, ones he says he does not feel ashamed of because the supervision and mentorship simply were not there. They are also, tellingly, mistakes he now refuses to let anyone at his own firm repeat.

Two motivations pushed him out on his own. The first was a conviction that clients deserved a better experience than the one he had been able to offer. The second was more personal: he wanted an intellectual challenge beyond the legal work itself. Running a business, building something, engaged a part of his mind that petition drafting alone did not.

The timing was deliberate. He was 29 and Hellrung was 30, young for firm founders, but Meltzer argues immigration is one of the few legal fields where that works. The work is flat fee, smaller clients are reachable, and the downside was survivable. "If it doesn't work well, I've developed a few clients, I'll go join some other firm," he remembers thinking. "That's the worst case scenario. I'm sure I'll be employable." With no children yet and few major obligations, a disruption to his income was not insurmountable. So he convinced Hellrung to jump with him, and Meltzer Hellrung was born.

Founding an Immigration Law Firm: Hustle, Systems, and Saying Yes

Ask Meltzer what actually carried the firm through its earliest days and the answer is refreshingly unglamorous. "It's just a lot of hustle, in all honesty," he says.

He still reaches out to new founders regularly to offer what he calls his two cents, partly because he believes it is good karma to pass it on. His wife, also a lawyer, recently launched her own practice in special education law, so the subject is close to home. Two pieces of advice come up again and again.

The first is to build systems before you think you need them. "Your future self will thank your past self," he says. When you are not yet busy enough, that is exactly when you should be investing in software, templates, and process flows. The quiet stretches are not downtime; they are the foundation you will stand on later.

The second is simpler and harder: network relentlessly, and make peace with rejection. "Don't be afraid to knock on doors," he says. As a small firm, you have to be willing to hear no, or hear nothing at all, a great many times. When the work does come through, you treat those relationships as the assets they are, and you look for ways to return the favor to the people who refer to you.

"It's not rocket science," he says. "You have to be a human who can tolerate the failure of not getting things easily and can maintain decent relationships with people."

Scaling a Law Firm: Buy the Best Skills, Not the Most Hours

Meltzer Hellrung now runs roughly nine to ten attorneys and about 35 staff overall, and Meltzer is candid that managing a firm of that size is a different and harder discipline than hustling for the first clients ever was.

His scaling philosophy inverts a common instinct. Do not default to full time hires, and do not shop for the most hours you can afford. Shop for the best skills your money can buy. He recently walked his wife through the same logic when her own practice took off and she assumed she needed a paralegal. Maybe, he told her, but consider whether an executive assistant, a part time law clerk from a nearby law school, or a packaged service provider might be the better fit for what she actually needed done.

Then there is the question he clearly relishes putting to founders: what can technology take off your plate? He points to his own early spending on graphic designers to build client collateral, work that AI powered design tools can now get roughly ninety percent of the way toward for a fraction of the cost. "Your clients aren't going to care" about the last ten percent, he says, and the savings free you to invest where it counts.

Balancing skill against cost, he argues, is never a fixed equation. "You have to constantly be asking yourself and the people you work with what the biggest challenges are, because it's going to constantly evolve," he says. Solve one bottleneck and the discipline is to project the next one, and let that projection guide where the next dollar goes.

Underneath all of it sits a question he insists is deeply personal: what do you actually want your firm to be? He has real respect for small practitioners who have found a quarter of a million dollars or so of annual work, earn a strong living, and work less hard than he does. "Are you comfortable saying no to work?" he asks. "I was never comfortable saying no. I always wanted to take on the next stuff." Growth or status quo is not a right answer, he says. "That's a really personal question."

How AI Is Reshaping Immigration Law

When the conversation turns to artificial intelligence, Meltzer does not hedge. "It is going to be a huge disruptor," he says, and he believes the industry is only at the beginning of feeling it.

So far, he says, the biggest impact has been on drafting. His firm handles EB-1 and national interest waiver petitions, and AI has meaningfully cut the time it takes to get data onto the page. What it has not changed, he is careful to note, is the attorney's real job. "It does not change what the attorney does, creating a narrative, creating an argument, focusing where it matters most."

The larger shift, he predicts, is agentic workflows, and they will reshape what clients expect. For years, speed in immigration work has been a luxury that cost more. Meltzer thinks AI flattens that. "Speed is going to become an expectation," he says, not a premium.

The Great Bifurcation in Business Immigration

That change, in his view, splits the market in two. On one end sit clients who want to pay as little as possible; they will either bring immigration work in house on software or turn to low cost providers where an attorney mostly signs off on AI generated output, service is minimal, and price is rock bottom. On the other end sit clients willing to pay more, who will demand even more in return: compliance, strategy, advising, and the deep relational work that transactional providers cannot offer.

There has always been a spectrum of service in immigration, Meltzer notes, but AI is going to stretch it into a genuine divide. The firms that thrive will know clearly which end they are serving.

When Theoretical Risk Becomes Real Risk

Some of Meltzer's sharpest observations concern what AI is doing on the government's side of the table. For much of his career, he could tell a client that a given exposure was, in theory, a risk, while adding that the odds of anyone ever noticing were so close to zero it was not worth the effort to fix.

"That's not the same anymore," he says. AI tools give agencies a far deeper set of data at their fingertips, surface connections across agencies and public records, and put them in front of adjudicators. Risks that were purely theoretical five or ten years ago are real risks today. "It's an arms race," he says, one increasingly fought over data security and compliance.

Venture Capital and Private Equity Enter Immigration Law

Beyond AI, Meltzer sees two other forces reshaping the field. One is government policy, which he expects to remain volatile for years, with changes profound enough that even a future shift in administration would produce whiplash rather than a clean reset.

The other is capital. For generations, he says, law has been "a castle where the walls of outside capital could not breach." Outside investment barely touched the profession beyond litigation funding, making it "one of these jewels of the economy that is untouched." That is changing fast as bar associations, states, and firm structures evolve, and venture capital and private equity begin to move in.

Meltzer draws a sharp line between the two. Venture capital typically hunts for returns of ten times an investment at minimum, often far more, and he is openly skeptical that a professional services business like law can deliver that. He points to Manifest, which he describes as the leading venture backed player in immigration, as having raised a sizable round and begun poaching talent and pursuing large clients. Private equity, he suspects, is the better fit, because it looks at scale and efficiency rather than moonshot multiples.

His own firm has positioned itself for this new environment. This year, Meltzer Hellrung restructured into a management services organization paired with a law firm. It has taken on no outside investors, but the structure lets the firm think differently: it can extend equity to key non lawyer staff in finance, marketing, and product, and it preserves the option to take investment later if the moment is right.

Meltzer even wonders aloud whether immigration, long siloed because it never fit neatly into multi practice firms, might now find a home in unexpected places as the economics change: accounting firms, HR platforms, or consulting practices. "There's a million different ways where it could fit," he says, that the profession once dismissed as impossible. "I don't think that's the case anymore."

Adopt AI Now, or Watch Your Practice Atrophy

Two weeks before our conversation, Meltzer was at the American Immigration Lawyers Association conference in San Diego, where he says attorneys sorted neatly into three camps on AI. There are the eager adopters. There are the pragmatists who wait for the enthusiasts to prove a tool works before investing. And there are the resisters.

Of that last group, Meltzer is blunt and a little amused. "You guys can just chill out over there and have fun, because it doesn't matter whether you like it or not," he says. The technology is coming regardless.

His warning to skeptics is measured but firm. Not adopting tools is not a crisis today, he says, but in two years it will start to be. Immigration clients are famously sticky, loyal to the attorney rather than the firm, so resisters are unlikely to lose the business they have. The damage shows up elsewhere. When prospective clients look around and see a practice that cannot deliver faster, more sophisticated service, they simply choose someone else. "It's just going to be an atrophy of your practice," he says. For a sixty five year old attorney a few years from retirement, riding it out may be fine. For anyone who wants to grow, it is not.

Building the Immigration Law Firm of the Future

All of this shapes who Meltzer wants around him. The attorneys and paralegals who thrive at his firm, he says, are deeply client service focused and genuinely comfortable advising on risk. On that last point he is emphatic: risk decisions belong to the client, not the attorney. He will not file something frivolous, but as long as a case is plausible, he lays out the risk profile and lets the client choose. "I have clients who are incredibly conservative. That's fine," he says. "I have clients who aren't."

Above all, he wants people who are energized by change rather than threatened by it. "If you are intent on doing things the way you always did, you're not a good fit here," he says. "If you're open to the change and looking for ways to harness it for the better, those are the people we want."

That instinct, to keep some control over your own direction rather than being carried by forces you did not choose, is the thread that ties Meltzer's story together. "We want to continue to control our own destiny," he says of the firm he has spent more than a decade building.

It is a fitting note for someone who entered immigration law almost by accident and now intends to help shape where it goes next. The wave is coming, Meltzer argues, for every firm in the field. The only real question is whether you learn to surf it.