Our law firm is delighted to announce to our clients nationwide that it was nominated for the 2008 TechColumbus innovations award in the category of “outstanding product” for its creation of the immigration case management software called VisaTurbo. We are also happy to state that our product was also chosen as a finalist in the competition which drew more than 160 astute competitor companies all having less than 50 employees.
In 1999 brothers Gus and Sam Shihab, the owners of a law firm immigration our law firm embarked on a project for designing and launching online case management software which would propel them forward ahead of their peers and provide unprecedented quality legal services. The product was called VisaPlanner which was launched in 2002. VsaPlanner is the predecessor of the current software called VisaTurbo. Currently VisaTurbo includes more 20,000 record entries, documents and notes pertaining to their client case processing status.
Being immigrants themselves, Gus and Sam Shihab are two lawyers among 10,000 other immigration lawyers nationwide. They realized that the key to success in this practice is to be close to their clients and this software has been successful in achieving this goal. Few law firms have undertaken a similar project and those include some of the largest immigration law firms in the country. About the same time, other software providers have designed similar products that are now for sale to immigration law practitioners. Holding engineering degrees from The Ohio State University, Gus and Sam employed a full time in-house software engineer Kevin Dagostine who wrote the program under their constant direction and supervision. Gus and Sam Shihab provided instructions regarding architecture, software functionality, deliverables, and look and feel. While other software development companies who designed similar products employ dozens of software engineers and programmers to design their commercial product, our law firm has been successful in simultaneously and independently designing an identical product with 70% functionality with their current team.
The clientele of this law firm have traditionally been corporations providing health care, engineering, information technology manufacturing products and services as well as institutions of higher learning. These clients look to Shihab & Associates, Co., LPA to provide visa and green card services for their highly skilled employees in various disciplines spanning the entire globe. Being highly accomplished individuals themselves, these clients require timely, accurate and available information about the progress of their visa applications which involve protracted bureaucratic processes before various governmental agencies. VisaTurbo provides data collection modules, virtual file opportunities for viewing documents filed and responses received from the various governmental agencies, phone communications and e-mail records, workflow updates, as well as reminders for milestone and critical expiration dates. The software also has automatic population mechanisms which link the particular case to the government website for immediate check on the status of their case.
We are proud that Shihab & Associates, Co., LPA is meritorious of an innovation award because of its original creation and launching of an online software program which has improved its service and the implementation of this colossal effort with efficient human resources. Certainly no other immigration lawyer in the State of Ohio has embarked on a project like this. Moreover, out of 10,000 other immigration lawyers nationwide, only larger law firms have had the resources to devise a similar product. Other commercial products have been introduced simultaneously and independently with substantially greater investment.