No. Establish the actual qualifying employment under the applicable rules rather than counting every year of commercial contact. The terms, employer and work performed need review. A later employment contract cannot simply turn all earlier consulting into qualifying employment.
Build the chronology from genuine records
Compare agreements, payments and role evidence and explain transitions accurately. Do not relabel invoices as payroll or backdate an appointment. If a period needs legal classification, provide the underlying facts rather than an unsupported conclusion.
Start with a chronology of payroll, contracts, leave, and duties, then identify the related organizations and the proposed U.S. role. The review should state which period counts and which fact remains unproven. For L-1B, separate special company knowledge from ordinary skill; for L-1A, identify the managed staff or function and the operational work performed by others. The person must have completed one continuous year with the related foreign organization during the preceding three years; L-1A stay is generally capped at seven years. Hypothetical example: A a municipal-archive digitization manager who supervised a vendor abroad but will have no staff or managed function in the United States. The first review should identify the missing record, decide whether the facts can be documented truthfully, and postpone the next step if they cannot. Relabelling routine work or reconstructing records after the event creates a credibility problem.
Construct a month-by-month record distinguishing consulting invoices from payroll employment, and identify the employing entity, supervision, benefits, working hours and duties for each segment. L-1 eligibility generally requires one continuous year of qualifying employment abroad during the preceding three years with a parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate that remains doing business. For L-1A, the proposed U.S. duties must be primarily managerial or executive; a commercial relationship alone supplies neither the foreign year nor the qualifying corporate link. A common mistake is counting early independent assignments simply because the same group later hired the person. The ordinary L-1A maximum is seven years.
Hypothetical example: A Saguenay metal-finishing consultant advised a manufacturer for fourteen months, then became its production manager for eleven months. His contracts, tax records, payroll slips and reporting charts show when control and employment actually changed. The company cannot combine the consultancy and payroll periods to manufacture a continuous qualifying year. It instead waits for accurate records to establish the required employment and separately documents his proposed authority over an essential production function.