Industry Updates
Magazine
Brand Story
Press Release
BLOGS
Jinhee Wilde is the founder of WA Law Group, a Maryland-based boutique law firm specializing in immigration law. With over 36 years of legal experience, Jinhee’s background is diverse and unique. She began her legal career as a prosecutor for Chicago and later served as an Inspector General designee, special counsel, and attorney advisor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Jinhee has also worked as a corporate lawyer, facilitating multi-million dollar transactions for multinational companies. For the past 23 years, Jinhee has focused her legal practice on business and investment immigration, providing her clients with both fierce advocacy and personable advice. Her straightforward and candid attitude is evident in both her personal and public life, and she takes her clients’ cases as seriously as she would her own. This dedication to her clients has earned Ms. Wilde and the WA Law Group numerous accolades, including recognition as a Top 25 EB-5 lawyer, Top 100 Attorney, and Top 10 immigration lawyer. Newsweek has also named Jinhee a Legal Superstar. Clients rave about the exceptional service provided by the WA Law Group, which goes above and beyond what other law firms offer. Ms. Wilde received her bachelor’s degree from The University of Chicago and her Juris Doctorate from Loyola University of Chicago School of Law.
After founding her law firm in 2009 as Wilde and Associates, Ms. Wilde later renamed it the WA Law Group. Today, her boutique firm boasts a team of attorneys with over 5 decades of combined experience, providing a comprehensive suite of immigration legal services. Ms. Wilde and her team prioritize accuracy and go above and beyond to meet their clients’ individual needs, including promptly responding to emails, calls, and inquiries. Ms. Wilde personally sets the standard, taking full responsibility for each client’s success. This level of commitment has earned WA Law Group long-term working relationships with numerous satisfied clients.
We recently got to sit down with Jinhee to learn more about how she is changing the world of immigration law.
Below are the highlights of the interview.
Q) Can we have a brief background on your professional journey? What was your journey like to get where you are?
Ms. Wilde) I started my career as a prosecutor for the City of Chicago and then as the Special Counsel and Inspector General Designee for the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. After 10 years as a government lawyer, I transitioned to being a corporate attorney, negotiating and preparing multi-million dollar contracts for multinational companies at a big DC law firm. In early 2000, I began helping some immigration clients at deportation trials where I saw that the previous attorneys’ incompetence or negligence had put their clients in a bind that led to tremendous hardships for the applicants and frustration by the judges. I felt that I could better help some of these immigration applicants and began taking more immigration cases.
Q) What led to the inception of WA Law Group?
Ms. Wilde) I established WA Law Group to do the cases right in the first place and be more accessible to my clients without worrying about billable hours. Legal immigration, if done correctly, is a Win-Win-Win program. The immigrants enter the U.S. legally; U.S. employers get much-needed workers legally; and the U.S. economy benefits from employers’ increased productivity and revenue. I am happy to be part of this.
Q) Please share some details about WA Law Group and how it is helping its clients.
Ms. Wilde) WA Law Group is a boutique business immigration law firm. We help U.S. employers to sponsor and obtain legal immigrant workers to fill the manual labor positions that U.S. workers don’t want. We also do investment immigration cases where foreign investors invest nearly $1 million in a U.S. business or projects to create 10+ full-time and permanent jobs per each investor, which helps the U.S. economy.
Q) What makes WA Law Group different from its competitors?
Ms. Wilde) WA Law Group is different from other law firms in how we put our clients’ comfort and peace of mind above our profitability and billable hours. We do not do cases as an assembly line, with paralegals or assistants doing most of the work while the top attorneys are not accessible to clients. We answer clients’ emails and phone calls within 24 hours, and I, as the CEO, personally respond to emails often until 2 am EST so that clients located overseas can work with me directly.
Q) How do you motivate creativity and innovation while maintaining a healthy work environment?
Ms. Wilde) I encourage respect and camaraderie among staff and nurture staff as if they are my own children. I pay travel costs to send them on vacation once a year and have always allowed flexibility with their work schedules to accommodate working parents even before the pandemic and work-from-home became popular.
Q) What does success look like for you?
Ms. Wilde) Success is very subjective, but to me it is having satisfied clients whose lives have changed for the better after navigating the arduous immigration process with our firm and then trusting us once again with referrals of their families and friends. At WA Law Group, we don’t chase dollars; we chase reputation.
Q) What are the major challenges of the industry? How are you tackling them?
Ms. Wilde) Immigration practice is very cyclical and varies from one administration to another. For example, during the Trump administration the processing of legal immigration cases was slowed so much that the processing times of cases doubled and tripled. Because we are very accessible and communicative with our clients, they trusted that we were doing everything possible to move their cases and waited patiently for the ultimate approvals, albeit with a timeframe of years instead of months. I know several small immigration law firms that went out of business because they lost so many of their clients who quit the process out of frustration.
Q) What are your thoughts on the Gender pay gap? How are you planning to tackle it?
Ms. Wilde) In the legal field, and particularly at large law firms, there is a gender pay gap, and I have been subjected to that myself. The gender pay gap incentivized me to establish my own law firm and is a reason why there are more women lawyers as solo practitioners or working at small law firms. The legal work is the same whether done by a male or female. Thus, there should not be any gender pay gap.
Q) How do you focus on Diversity and Inclusion in WA Law Group?
Ms. Wilde) WA Law Group encourages diversity and inclusion in hiring and mentoring. In fact, most of my staff are minority working moms, and I am proud to promote a culture of work-family balance where they can blossom and stay with the firm for years.
Q) What are you looking to accomplish in the next 5 years from a personal as well as professional point of view?
Ms. Wilde) I would like to retire in the next 5 years and allow the WA Law Group to maintain and grow its current practice of exceptional client service, which I hope will be my legacy.
