How to Use VisaWorker: A Step-by-Step Guide

VisaWorker is a drafting workspace for extraordinary-ability immigration petitions. You bring the evidence and the judgment; the tool handles the structure, the citations, the typesetting and the tedious parts of assembling a petition that a reviewing officer can actually follow.

This guide walks through the way the product is meant to be used, in order. A note before anything else: VisaWorker is not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. The tool does not decide whether your background is ready for USCIS, and it does not guarantee an outcome. That judgment stays with you and, if you choose to work with one, your attorney.

Before you commit: try the demo

If you want to see the workspace before creating an account, open /demo. It drops you straight into a real, fully-populated workspace, a seeded EB-1A petition, with no signup. It is a shared sandbox that resets every 15 minutes, so treat it as a showroom rather than somewhere to keep work.

Create your account and open a case

Sign up with an email and password. On first login you sign a short handshake: two acknowledgements that VisaWorker is not a law firm and that no outcome is guaranteed, plus the terms. It takes ten seconds and it exists so that expectations are set before you start writing.

You then land on your case list. Create a new petition with the beneficiary's name and the visa type: EB-1A (Extraordinary Ability, immigrant), O-1A (Extraordinary Ability, nonimmigrant), or NIW (National Interest Waiver). Your choice determines the section outline the case is seeded with. EB-1A cases open with the statutory criteria laid out one by one, a Final Merits Determination and an Exhibit Index. O-1A adds the advisory opinion and itinerary sections. NIW is structured around the three Dhanasar prongs.

You do not have to pay to start. There are three ways in: a five-message free preview, enough to see how the assistant works on your actual facts; bring your own Anthropic API key and the case unlocks fully at no cost to us or you; or pay $249 per case, which includes a large token budget for drafting, revision and compiling. Use the free preview the way it is intended: to assess whether your case is worth pursuing at all.

Start with the conversation, not the document

When a new case opens, the workspace deliberately shows only the chat pane. That is not a bug, it is the intake. Talk to the assistant the way you would brief a paralegal. Who is the beneficiary, what field, what have they actually done, what proof exists and where is it. The assistant records the facts it needs, tells you what is missing, and starts building a plan.

Two things happen during this phase. The assistant will often render a document request directly in the chat, a small list of named slots like "PhD diploma" or "citation report." You drag files straight into those slots, and it knows which request each file answers. It will also offer next-step chips, two to four clickable suggestions like "Draft the Awards section now." They are shortcuts, not instructions; you can ignore them and say what you actually want.

Strategy: the running plan

Open the Strategy tab. This is a single living document per case, maintained mostly by the assistant: the plan, outstanding to-dos, evidence gaps and open questions. You can edit it directly and it saves as you type. Read it before every working session. It is the fastest way to remember where you left off, and the fastest way to see which criteria are still thin.

Being honest in the strategy doc is the highest-leverage thing you can do. "Citation count is mediocre for this field" written down early is worth more than a confident draft built on a weak criterion.

Exhibits: build the evidence docket

Open the Exhibits tab. This is your docket, and it is where most of the real work lives. You can upload PDFs, Word documents, plain text or Markdown, and JPEG, PNG or WEBP images. You can also capture a webpage, useful for press coverage or a conference programme that only exists online.

Each exhibit gets a stable label (ex01, ex02, and so on) that the assistant cites in the text. Display numbers and labels can drift apart as you add and delete things; Compact labels renumbers every exhibit and every citation in one pass so the final document reads cleanly.

Upload the real artefact, not a summary of it. A screenshot of a citation count is weaker than the report it came from. Name files descriptively before uploading, it makes the docket readable and helps the assistant reason about what it has.

Sections: draft the petition

Open the Sections tab to see the petition itself, section by section, in the outline your visa type was seeded with. You can write directly in a section, but the intended workflow is to ask. Tell the assistant which criterion you want drafted and what evidence supports it, and it writes into that section, citing exhibits by label rather than by a hardcoded "Exhibit 12." That indirection is what makes renumbering safe later.

Work criterion by criterion rather than trying to generate the whole petition in one go. Ask for one section, read it critically, correct the facts, then move on. The assistant is a strong writer and a poor witness, every factual claim in the draft is yours to verify.

Recommendation letters

Letters live at the top of the Exhibits tab. Ask the assistant to draft a letter for a specific recommender and it produces a first version tailored to that person's relationship to the beneficiary and the criteria the letter is meant to support. You edit it, then send it for review: that generates a private link you pass to the recommender.

On that link, with no account and no login, the recommender can either sign (typed name plus a signature) or leave a comment asking for changes. A signed letter is turned into a PDF and drops into the docket as a numbered exhibit automatically, citable like anything else. Give recommenders something specific to react to rather than a blank page, and let them change it. A letter that reads like the petitioner wrote it helps nobody.

Preview: build the PDF

Open the Preview tab and press Build PDF. VisaWorker typesets the petition through LaTeX and hands you a compiled PDF: numbered sections, an auto-generated exhibit index and consistent inline citations throughout. Your exhibits are bundled in. You can also download source files if you want the raw LaTeX and exhibits, useful if an attorney wants to take over the document, or if you simply want an offline copy of everything.

Compile early and often. Reading your own argument as a laid-out document is a different experience from reading it in an editor, and it surfaces problems that nothing else does.

A suggested working rhythm

Read the Strategy doc. Fill one evidence gap it names, upload the exhibits. Ask for one section to be drafted from that evidence. Correct the facts yourself. Build the PDF and read it as a document. Ask the assistant to update the strategy doc, and stop. Repeat.

A petition assembled over a few weeks in short, honest sessions is far stronger than one generated in an afternoon. VisaWorker will not tell you whether you qualify, and it will not invent evidence. It will not file for you, and it is not a substitute for an immigration attorney. What it will do is make a well-structured, properly-cited, professionally typeset petition something you can actually build yourself.

If you want to see how it works on your case, start free or open the demo.