Palladino, Isbell & Casazza, LLC

Focus and practice areas

Palladino, Isbell & Casazza, which brands itself as PIC Law, is a Philadelphia law firm built around United States immigration law. The firm also handles personal injury claims. Its clients include individuals, families and employers.

The immigration side covers a wide span of matters. Deportation defense and removal work sits alongside family-based petitions, asylum and refugee applications, and naturalization. The firm also takes on employment-based immigration and non-immigrant visas, student and exchange visas, U visas and T visas, waivers, immigration appeals and denaturalization cases.

Employers get a separate line of work: I-9 audits and compliance. That side of immigration practice tends to be document-heavy and deadline-driven, since a Notice of Inspection from Immigration and Customs Enforcement usually gives an employer three business days to produce its I-9 forms.

APA and Mandamus litigation

The firm files lawsuits under the Administrative Procedure Act and mandamus actions, and it states that its partners handle these directly. These are federal court cases, filed when an agency has sat on an application or made a decision the applicant wants reviewed. In my opinion, assigning them to partners makes sense given what they involve: federal pleading standards, a government defendant represented by a US Attorney's office, and an administrative record that has to be picked apart.

A mandamus petition asks a federal judge to order an agency to act on something it has left pending. An APA claim challenges the agency action itself. Both run on a different clock and a different set of rules from the benefits applications that make up most immigration filings.

How the team is built

The attorneys page lists 17 lawyers with titles and individual email addresses. Five carry the partner title: Ricky Palladino, Alex Isbell, Christopher M. Casazza, Caitlin Costello and Natalia Ruggiero. Andrea Saylor is listed as a senior attorney.

Below that tier the site names Stephanie Curl, Mana Aliabadi, Colleen Doherty, Michael Hannum, Lina Duiker and Adam Boyd Quaintance as attorneys. The firm describes a wider staff too: of-counsel lawyers, paralegals and support staff. For a practice that runs immigration filings at volume, paralegal capacity matters as much as attorney headcount, because so much of the work is evidence assembly and form preparation.

Five partners for a firm this size gives it room to spread supervision across matters. It also means the federal litigation the firm reserves for partners has more than one or two people who can take it.

Languages spoken in the office

The firm lists eleven languages spoken by its team: Spanish, French, Wolof, Georgian, Russian, Portuguese, Kyrgyz, Finnish, Tajik, Farsi and Dari.

That list is worth pausing on. Spanish and French are common enough in an immigration practice. Wolof, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Dari and Georgian are far less so, and each maps to a specific migration route into the United States. Wolof points toward Senegal and Gambia. Dari and Farsi point toward Afghanistan and Iran. Tajik and Kyrgyz point toward Central Asia.

Language capacity has practical weight in immigration work. Asylum interviews and immigration court hearings run through interpreters, and the preparation that happens before those hearings is where a client's account gets translated into a declaration. Doing that preparation in the client's own language, with the lawyer or a staff member who speaks it, removes a layer of distortion.

Where the firm works from

PIC Law runs three offices. Two are in Philadelphia, one in South Philadelphia and one in Center City. The third is in Media, Pennsylvania, the Delaware County seat.

The geography lines up with how immigration cases actually get handled in this region. The Philadelphia Immigration Court hears removal cases for a large catchment area, and the Philadelphia field office of US Citizenship and Immigration Services handles interviews and biometrics for the surrounding counties. A firm with offices on both sides of the city line can meet clients closer to where they live while still appearing in the same court.

The Media office extends reach into Delaware County. As a reviewer, I read the three-office setup as a sign the firm expects clients to come in person and repeatedly, which is realistic: immigration matters generate multiple appointments over months or years.

What a client can expect from the practice areas named

Removal defense

Deportation cases begin with a Notice to Appear and proceed through master calendar hearings before an immigration judge, then an individual hearing if relief is being sought. Common forms of relief include cancellation of removal, adjustment of status and asylum. Appeals go to the Board of Immigration Appeals, and the firm lists immigration appeals among its practice areas.

Family and humanitarian petitions

Family-based immigration runs on petitions filed with USCIS, with waiting times tied to the applicant's category and country of birth. U visas and T visas apply to victims of certain crimes and of trafficking, and they carry their own certification and evidentiary requirements. Waivers come into play when a ground of inadmissibility blocks an otherwise approvable case.

Personal injury

Alongside the immigration practice, the firm handles car accidents, tractor-trailer accidents, medical malpractice, slip and fall, wrongful death and product liability claims. Pennsylvania sets a two-year limitation period for most personal injury actions, and the state's choice between limited tort and full tort auto coverage shapes what a claimant can recover.

What the published record shows

The firm publishes its legal name, Palladino, Isbell & Casazza, LLC, on its home page and in its footer, along with structured data on its website that names the firm and its alternate name, PIC Law. It maintains accounts on Facebook, X and Instagram.

Individual email addresses appear for every listed attorney. That is a meaningful detail in a directory built on evidence, because it gives a prospective client a named person to write to rather than a general inbox.

The site does not state a founding year, and it does not publish attorney biographies, law schools or admission dates. What it does publish is a full attorney roster with titles, a detailed practice area list, three office locations and eleven languages. In my opinion, that combination tells a prospective client most of what they need to decide whether to make contact: who works there, what the firm takes on, where it sits and whether someone there speaks their language. The firm describes itself as dedicated to immigration law, with personal injury as a second area of practice.