There is a moment, somewhere past the 13,000th signed contract, when a services firm has to decide what it actually is. Diego Urquijo decided his was a technology company that had been operating without its technology — and spent the past several years correcting the omission. On Aug. 19, the correction shipped: "URPE IS," the client app of URPE Integral Services, went live on the App Store. As Urquijo frames it, that was the day the firm officially became a legaltech.
Urquijo is the president of URPE Integral Services, an immigration case-preparation services firm — not a law firm, and it does not provide legal advice — that operates in every U.S. state and serves its clients entirely in Spanish. Since its founding, the firm has filed more than 13,000 immigration cases of all types — asylum, work visas, adjustments of status — according to its physical contracts and records. Its registered community exceeds 35,000 people, and more than 1,200 EB-2 National Interest Waiver cases sit in active preparation today.
The market he is playing for is not small. The United States is home to roughly 65 million Hispanics — the firm's stated addressable market — and Urquijo's wager is that this market does not want a translated afterthought. It wants a firm that is native in its language from the first conversation to the push notification. In a professional-services landscape where Spanish is usually a checkbox, he made it the operating system.
The power dynamics of his industry shifted under him, and in his favor — provided he could keep up. Petitions for the EB-2 National Interest Waiver, the green-card category in which professionals petition for themselves without an employer sponsor, roughly tripled from 21,990 in fiscal 2022 to 66,276 in fiscal 2025, according to USCIS data analyzed by specialized publications. Then Washington raised the bar: approval rates near 96% in fiscal 2022 fell to 55.2% in fiscal 2025 and to 42.6% in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, after USCIS guidance effective Jan. 15, 2025 — known as PA-2025-03 — sharpened scrutiny of a petitioner's proposed endeavor, support letters and business plans. More than 82,000 petitions now wait in the queue, with typical processing around 24 months.
Most firms met that squeeze with more paperwork. Urquijo met it with a doctrine: build the venture before you file. His team constructs the client's actual business — a business plan with econometric modeling, white papers, brand identity, a working MVP or web application, expert endorsements, certified translations — across 11 stages and 24 deliverables, so the petition describes something that already operates. He makes no promises about outcomes or timelines; every case is decided on its own merits. What he promises is depth.
The operational bet underneath is the one that should interest anyone who runs a services P&L. URPE built a proprietary AI platform that accompanies clients 24 hours a day — answering questions, tracking progress, keeping cases moving — while human advisors own each phase of the work. The machines absorbed availability and repetition; the specialists kept judgment. The 11-stage process would be prohibitively labor-intensive without the platform. The platform would be hollow without the people.
The app is the visible edge of that machine. Free on the App Store and tied to an active client account, it shows each client the exact stage of their case in real time, moves documents securely, opens a direct line to their coordinator and advisor, tracks stage-based payments — and pushes a notification the instant their petition is filed with the government. An Android version is in development; clients also use the firm's web portal. In an industry whose default client experience is silence, Urquijo made the silence obsolete.
"AI was never the point, and neither is the app. The point is that a family navigating the most important process of their lives should never have to wonder what is happening to their case. Now they don't wonder. They look." — Diego Urquijo
The prevailing assumption in American business is that AI hollows out service firms. Urquijo's arithmetic runs the other way: automation as the floor that lets human expertise concentrate where it compounds. Whether the rest of his industry follows is an open question. What is no longer open is whether the model exists. It has 13,000 filed cases of every type behind it, 1,200 more on the workbench — and, as of this month, a listing in the App Store where its clients can watch the machine work.
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Disclosure: this outlet is a publication of URPE AI Lab LLC, the group that also owns URPE Integral Services, the company covered in this story.
