Because the evidence has to be built rather than collected. A comparative claim about knowledge requires internal documents to be gathered, supervisors to be interviewed and a description written from scratch, and the possibility of a request for further evidence means a second round of work should be budgeted rather than hoped against.
Budget for the second round as well as the first
Employers frequently price these cases as though they were routine, then discover that the internal effort — retrieving old procedure versions, getting a busy manager to describe a colleague's knowledge in writing — is the expensive part, even though it never appears on an invoice. Government charges are separate and are published in the current USCIS fee schedule; amounts change, so figures quoted in older material should not be relied on. When comparing advisers, ask specifically whether responding to a request for additional evidence is included in the quoted price or billed separately, since in this category that question is not hypothetical. Nothing about preparation cost predicts an outcome, and no adviser can properly promise one.
The first cost question is whether the company can prove specialized knowledge without inventing a narrative around ordinary competence. Budget time for a supervisor interview, document retrieval, and a careful comparison with widely available training. If the evidence is thin, learning that before a filing can prevent avoidable professional fees. L-1B normally requires twelve continuous foreign months with a qualifying organization during the applicable three-year period and has a five-year limit. Hypothetical example: A water-treatment supplier proposes moving its membrane-fouling diagnostician. The employer should price the effort to retrieve historical test protocols before promising a relocation package based on an untested petition.