Law Office of Brian T. Richards

Focus and practice areas

Immigration filings for families make up the working core of this Lansing office. Brian T. Richards handles adjustment of status and green card processing, along with waivers and naturalization applications.

The service list runs further than those staples. Deferred action and DACA cases, Temporary Protected Status, and consular processing through the National Visa Center all appear in the firm's stated work. Fiancé and spouse visas, plus the marriage-based filings that follow them, sit in the same lane.

Requests for evidence get named separately, which is worth noticing. An RFE arrives when USCIS wants more from a file already in the system, and answering one well takes a different kind of attention than starting a case from scratch. Listing it as its own service suggests the firm takes that work on for people who may have filed alone.

Where clients can be located

Immigration law is federal, and the office says it can help clients anywhere in the United States. That matters for a small practice in mid-Michigan. A family in Texas or Georgia with a Lansing connection can retain the same attorney who handles the local caseload.

How the team is built

Two people do the work. Brian T. Richards is the attorney, and Nikki is the paralegal who prepares forms and documents for submission.

A two-person office means the attorney who takes the consultation is the attorney who signs the filings. In my opinion, that structure suits immigration work, where a single case can stretch across years and several rounds of correspondence with the government. The person answering questions in month thirty has been on the file since month one.

It also sets a ceiling on volume. A practice this size takes the cases it can carry, and prospective clients should expect a caseload sized to two sets of hands.

The attorney's background

Richards earned his bachelor's degree from Grand Valley State University in 1992. He took his Juris Doctor from Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing five years later, in 1997, and passed the Michigan State Bar Exam that July.

He opened the Lansing practice the same year he was admitted. His first focus was family law and domestic relations. By 1999 he had concentrated on family-based immigration, and that is where the practice has stayed.

Teaching alongside practice

Richards taught in the Legal Assistant Program at Lansing Community College from January 1999 through December 2020, a stretch of nearly twenty-two years. He has also been faculty at Baker College.

Two decades in a paralegal classroom leaves a mark on how an attorney runs an office. Legal assistant programs drill document preparation, filing procedure, and deadline discipline, all of which are the daily texture of immigration practice. An attorney who taught those skills for that long has thought hard about how paperwork moves.

Credentials and memberships

Richards is a member of the State Bar of Michigan. He has belonged to the American Immigration Lawyers Association since 2005, which puts roughly two decades of AILA membership behind the current practice.

AILA membership is a meaningful marker in this field. The association is the main professional body for US immigration attorneys, and it is where practitioners track policy shifts, procedural changes, and agency guidance. Immigration rules move faster than most areas of law, so a working connection to that network is a practical asset for clients.

Continuity and the record on the ground

The firm opened in 1997 and marked its twenty-fifth year in 2022. It has run from the same Lansing location the whole time.

Twenty-nine years at one address in one city is an unusual fact in a directory built on evidence. Immigration practices come and go with policy cycles, and a single-attorney office that has held its ground since the Clinton administration has worked through several complete overhauls of federal immigration procedure. The lawyer who filed adjustment applications in 1999 has filed them under every administration since.

The website carries no LLC, PLLC, or professional corporation designation, so the firm appears to operate under the attorney's own name. That is common for solo practices of this vintage and tells prospective clients that the entity and the attorney are effectively the same thing.

How the office handles intake and cost

Initial consultations are free. Once a retainer is signed, the firm works on a fixed fee.

Fixed-fee immigration work is a client-friendly arrangement, and as a reviewer I would flag it as one of the more useful things on the site. Immigration cases involve long waits and unpredictable government requests, and hourly billing can make the total cost impossible to forecast at the outset. A flat figure agreed up front lets a family plan around a known number.

The free consultation lowers the barrier to a first conversation. People weighing whether they even have a case can find out before committing money, which is worth something in a field where eligibility questions are genuinely hard to answer without training.

What the listing supports

The site documents an attorney with a dated law degree, a dated bar admission, a dated founding, a dated AILA membership, and a twenty-two-year teaching record with named institutions. Each of those carries a year and an issuing body, so each can be checked independently.

The practice-area list is specific about procedures rather than generic about outcomes. Adjustment of status, waivers, TPS, DACA, NVC consular processing, RFE responses, naturalization: these are named filing types, and naming them tells a reader what the office actually does day to day.

What the site does not carry is case results, settlement figures, or rankings. For a family-immigration practice that is unsurprising, since outcomes turn on statute and agency discretion more than on advocacy theatrics. The verifiable material here sits in the credentials and the service list, and both hold up to reading.

The firm handles family-based immigration in Lansing, Michigan, and has since 1999, with one attorney and one paralegal working the files.