10,000 hours back: How Berry Appleman & Leiden built an AI-first immigration practice
Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP (BAL) is one of the largest corporate immigration law firms in the world, managing work visas, green cards, intra-company transfers and global mobility matters across more than 170 jurisdictions. Unlike general-practice law firms, BAL's work is defined by volume, repetition and government deadlines — a combination that makes it almost uniquely well-suited to AI and automation.
Rather than bolt AI onto a traditional practice, BAL built technology into the core of the firm and invited the lawyers to work around it.
BAL founded its Automation & AI Development Center in 2018, years before generative AI became mainstream in legal. The team studied the firm's case lifecycle in detail: intake, document collection, form population, government submission, status tracking, follow-up. Every stage had the same underlying pattern — structured data being repeatedly copied, reformatted and validated between portals, forms and case management systems.
The firm also recognised that the experience gap was the experience. For an employee moving to a new country, the journey was governed by deadlines, uncertainty and paperwork. Any hour saved by AI was an hour the firm could spend on actual counsel.
BAL's response was Cobalt — the firm's proprietary, cloud-based case management platform, built with AI and machine learning at its core and deployed to both clients and lawyers.
The platform runs several layers of automation:
Cobalt is ISO/IEC 27001 certified and designed for regulated global operations, with the cross-border data handling posture corporate clients require.
The numbers underscore the strategy. Over a six-month period, BAL's partnership with UiPath and Accelirate freed approximately 10,000 hours of existing workforce capacity — hours redirected from repetitive processing into direct client service and complex case judgement.
The platform now handles immigration casework across more than 170 jurisdictions, with AI-driven document processing and missing-item detection materially accelerating case preparation. Cobalt has been recognised externally as a leading legal-tech product, and the firm continues to extend the platform with new AI capabilities aimed at compliance, benchmarking and proactive policy monitoring.
The strategic signal is clear. In a practice area where speed to decision can determine whether an employee starts a job on time, BAL has made AI and automation a structural part of how immigration law is delivered — not a tool that assists lawyers, but a platform that lawyers work inside.
