Bill Benos focuses his practice on business and family-based immigration matters and strategic legal planning for internationally-based companies and individuals seeking to enter/reside in the United States.

Bill Benos focuses his practice on business and family-based immigration matters and strategic legal planning for internationally-based companies and individuals seeking to enter/reside in the United States.

As founder of the firm’s Immigration Practice, Bill combines his business and immigration experience to advise international clients on matters involving the cross-border movement of personnel.  Bill’s extensive experience in the immigration field includes representing business professionals with nonimmigrant visas, intracompany transfers, and investor visas.  He assists businesses and individuals with matters ranging from labor certifications, employment and family-based immigrant petitions, adjustment applications and petitions to remove conditions on residence, to investment-based petitions.  He also helps businesses with immigration compliance matters such as I-9 programs and ICE inspections.

Bill has served as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law since 2019 where he teaches Immigration Law, and as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Richmond School of Law where he has taught Immigration Law since 2007 and an externship in International Business Practice since 1995.

Bill also uses over 30 years of experience to assist international companies with their foreign direct investments (FDI), the formation and capitalization of business entities, the coordination of immigration strategy with investment plans and related business planning.  Given that several of Bill’s clients provide services to or do business with U.S. government agencies, he also counsels companies on matters related to government contracting and on planning their business and immigration affairs to conduct such business successfully.

Since 2004, Bill has served as honorary consul in Virginia for the Canadian government.  A native Canadian, he has coordinated several diplomatic trips connecting Canadian enterprises with business leaders in the United States.  Bill has served as a member of the Multi-Jurisdictional Practice Task Force for the Virginia State Bar and as legal advisor to the Illegal Immigration Task Force for the Virginia State Crime Commission.

Bill is listed in The Best Lawyers in America© for Immigration Law (2018-present).  He is a member of the American Bar Association, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Virginia Bar Association and the Richmond Bar Association.  Bill is also listed among the "Legal Elite" by Virginia Business magazine (2019-present).  He also has served as a past chair of the International Practice Section of the Virginia State Bar.  Bill currently chairs the Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School Foundation, and he has served as chair of Community in Schools in the county where he resides and as a trustee of the Chesterfield Education Foundation.

Prior to joining the firm, Bill practiced corporate, business and real estate law in London, Ontario, Canada.  He received his LL.B. degree in 1982 from the University of Western Ontario School of Law in London, Ontario, Canada, and his Juris Doctor degree in 1988 from the University of Richmond School of Law.  Bill is fluent in Greek, which enables him to assist Greek companies expanding into the U.S.