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Care to elaborate? Family-based immigration (the overwhelming majority of cases) only requires 3 to 5 forms and a lawyer can't help much as you have to provide all the infos and documents yourself. And for employment-based immigration, most of the burden is on the employer.

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Mine was employment based / EB1. It was not the number of forms, but the structure that made it complicated. The final package we submitted was over 150 pages total for me and my wife. This is in part because the same information is required multiple times, since the different steps get reviewed by different departments.

I finished the EB-1 process this year. As thankful as I may be for how it worked out eventually (and knowing that most employment based petitions do not fall in this category), I still regularly show people the picture I snapped of the 6 pounds of documentation I had to prepare and send to support my case. Maybe they just did a good job convincing me of their worth, but I can't imagine doing this without lawyers.

Thanks! Just would like to precise this is the exceptional category for 'alien with exceptional abilities' [0] who need to prove their exceptional abilities; all other employment-based petitions are filed by employers.

[0] http://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/permanent-workers...

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