Bernard Wolfsdorf is the winner of the corporate immigration lawyer of the year award for the second year running. The Santa Monica-based lawyer is the former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and a recognised name in this field. He has over 30 years’ experience representing clients and shares his views of the American immigration system and how legal practice has changed.

Angelo Paparelli at Seyfarth Shaw LLP, Peter Schiron Jr from Deloitte LLP and Mareza Estevez from Cognizant Technology Solutions* join heads to provide a compelling analysis of the challenges facing senior professionals in the field arising from global mobility management.

The leading corporate immigration lawyer in our research offers his expertise on current United States immigration policy.

The recent global economic crisis in many regions of the world has provided an opportunity for China by boosting its role in Asia and in the world economy at large. As the US, the EU and rest of the world gradually recovers from the crisis, China continues its trajectory of spectacular economic growth.

The United States is the primary playing field on which Israel vies with its international competitors for market position for products, services and technologies.

With the benefit of over 14 years of research and tens of thousands of votes from clients and private practitioners, Who’s Who Legal takes a closer look at developing trends in the corporate immigration legal marketplace worldwide.

Our research identifies 423 lawyers as leaders in the field worldwide, hailing from 32 countries. Here we provide further analysis of how the best law firms have performed in the research.

Our research identifies 403 outstanding lawyers from 31 jurisdictions. Several firms stood out as pre-eminent in our findings.

Despite the great benefits that corporate immigration can bring to local economies, it is often caught up in domestic debates about immigration as a whole and recent events have certainly demonstrated this.

Our research picks out 52 attorneys from 28 firms as the leading immigration practitioners in California. Home to a diverse mix of innovative companies, Fortune 500 multinationals and prestigious academic institutions, the state attracts leading executive, technical and scholastic talent from around the world. The state's Immigration Bar is also quite diverse, with sole practitioners and boutiques and major international firms competing for a share of the market.

Texas is blessed with many of the United States' leading corporate immigration attorneys.

Skills shortages, ageing populations and increased mobility have led companies to seek workers from further afield; multinational companies often need to relocate key employees.

This chapter is almost unique among the disciplines covered by our research, in that sole practitioners and immigration boutiques fare particularly well in comparison with the big firms.

This chapter identifies 27 individuals from 22 firms, all of whom are well equipped to handle the legal aspects of the immigration and naturalisation of skilled workers and their dependants on behalf of large corporate entities, investors, entertainers and individual businessmen and women. While a number of Florida’s leading full-service firms perform well in our research, the majority of the lawyers are sole practitioners or work out of immigration boutiques.

Fortune magazine’s 2007 ranking of America’s largest corporations by revenue reveals that California is home to 52 of the Fortune 500, many of which are industry leaders in sectors such as computing, defence, entertainment and utilities. Many of the world’s largest and most innovative companies are headquartered in the state and the high-tech hub of Silicon Valley, and the companies based there are a magnet for some of the globe’s brightest and most creative talent.