Technical evidence often needs selection, explanation and confidentiality review. Those tasks are preparation expenses, separate from government filing charges, applicable supplements, optional premium processing and any dependent applications.
Avoid paying for volume
Ask the engineering manager to identify a few strong examples before exporting large amounts of material. Estimate the work needed to make them understandable and connect them to the U.S. duties.
A commercial software licence, patent application or costly expert report is not a required L-1B purchase, and none substitutes for the employee’s qualifying history. The cost failure is paying for volume, and it compounds, because a large export takes longer to review for confidentiality, longer to explain and longer for anyone to read. The earliest signal is an estimate expressed in document counts rather than in examples.
Ask the engineering manager to nominate a few strong contributions before anything is exported, then estimate the work of making those understandable and connecting them to the proposed U.S. duties. A commercial software licence, a patent application or a costly expert report is not a required purchase for this classification, and none of them supplies the qualifying employment history or the corporate relationship, which remain the foundations of the case.
Agree the shortlist before any export is commissioned, not afterwards.