Clarify the employer and host’s commercial responsibilities, while identifying the evidence actually needed. A reimbursement disagreement does not change the petition’s evidentiary requirements.
Define the retrieval scope
List the employment, training and project records that resolve material questions. Ask the holder what can be supplied reliably and at what cost. Keep document retrieval, translation, professional services and current official fees separate. Avoid paying for a generic dossier that omits the actual employment relationship or commissioning a letter that asserts facts the writer cannot confirm.
The distinctive cost in a manufacturing case is the internal effort of turning a quality system into a petition exhibit: locating protocol revisions, retrieving validation and deviation records, assembling training matrices, and having a senior person write and sign a considered statement. Where L-1B differs is in the professional effort: assembling proprietary documentation, drafting a technical narrative that a non-specialist adjudicator can follow, and responding to a request for evidence, which is frequent in this category. Check the published fee schedule for current amounts and any optional faster-adjudication charge, then set beside it a realistic estimate of the hours needed to produce contemporaneous documents, translations and a truthful account of staffing depth. Government charges should be taken from the current G-1055 schedule, including the base petition fee, the fraud-prevention fee and any other statutory fee that applies to the company's size; premium processing is available at an additional charge.