Filing fees per the published USCIS schedule, translation of French-language technical and financial records, and a substantial amount of internal engineering and management time.
Internal time is the real invoice
Companies preparing a first L-1B petition usually underestimate the same line. Someone with technical authority has to identify precisely what is proprietary, retrieve records that may be scattered across shared drives and paper binders, and explain a process clearly enough for a non-specialist reviewer to follow. That person is normally also running the plant. Treat it as a scheduled project rather than as something to be squeezed in, because a rushed technical narrative is the most common cause of a request for further evidence, which then costs the same time again. Add certified translation for French-language documents, the U.S. entity’s own operating costs, and current government fees taken from the published USCIS fee schedule.
List petition, premium-processing if chosen, translations, travel, and document-production costs separately from operating expenses of the U.S. business. A high preparation budget does not substitute for proof that the employee possesses qualifying specialized knowledge. Spend first on records that explain the knowledge and foreign employment, then on presentation. Hypothetical example: an industrial-robotics supplier plans a costly video demonstration, but the dated internal deployment logs already provide the more probative account of the employee’s role.
Obtain a focused inventory of existing evidence before commissioning new explanations; contemporaneous records often provide clearer proof at lower cost than retrospective summaries.