Immigration lawyers Save the Olypmpic Games! :)

As skaters take silver, their lawyers get gold, Marcia Coyle, Staff reporter, 02-24-2006

Washington-Olympic medal winners routinely thank their coaches, their trainers and their families, but how often do they thank their lawyers?

“We want to thank our legal team,” were the first public words by ice dancer Ben Agosto, who with partner Tanith Belbin had just won the silver medal, the first U.S. medal in ice dancing in 30 years during the Olympics in Turin, Italy, on Feb. 20.

Without that legal team-led by Barney Skladany of the Washington office of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and assisted by Paul Virtue of D.C.’s Hogan & Hartson-Agosto and Belbin would have been forced to sit out their second Olympic competition in four years.

Belbin, a native of Canada, had a citizenship problem. Although she and Agosto had skated for the United States 32 times in national and international competitions, only American citizens can be on the U.S. Olympic team.

She came to Detroit to train with Agosto in 1999, earned her status as an alien of “extraordinary ability” in November 2000, and received her green card in early 2002. But she faced a five-year residency requirement, which meant she wasn’t eligible for citizenship until 2007. She and Agosto needed a miracle by Dec. 31, 2005, to make the U.S. Olympic team.

Agosto turned to family member Jessica Weisel, counsel to Akin Gump’s Los Angeles office, who in turn went to the firm’s pro bono committee last spring. After examining the facts and the law, the committee concluded, as the old saying goes, “You’re going to have to pass a federal law,” recalled Skladany.

Skladany, a government process attorney in the firm’s public policy practice, got the ice dancers to come to Washington to meet with him and Carl Levin, the Democratic U.S. senator from Michigan.

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KJ