The three things the company has to prove
The relationship between the two companies has to be one of the four the regulation names — parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate — and both have to be doing business: regular, systematic and continuous provision of goods or services. An agent or an address is not doing business, and that sentence is where thinly structured transfers fail.
You have to have worked for the qualifying organization abroad for one continuous year within the three years before admission. Continuous is the operative word: broken employment restarts the clock.
And the role in the United States has to be executive or managerial as 8 CFR 214.2(l)(1)(ii) defines those words — not as the business card defines them. See below, because this is the part that gets denied.
Managerial does not mean senior
The regulation describes managerial capacity as supervising and controlling the work of professional employees, or managing an essential function of the organization at a high level. Executive capacity is the ability to make decisions of wide latitude without much oversight.
Neither definition is about seniority, salary or title. A founder who does the work personally, a lead who supervises contractors, a head of a department that exists only on a slide — all of those read as operational to an adjudicator, however important the person actually is to the business.
A new office makes this harder, not easier. The company has one year to show that the role will be genuinely executive or managerial, and 8 CFR 214.2(l)(3)(v) requires secured physical premises before the petition, not after.
Why this one matters even if you want a green card
The L-1A is the only temporary category whose requirements line up almost exactly with a permanent one. The EB-1C asks for the same qualifying relationship, the same year abroad and the same managerial or executive capacity, under 8 CFR 204.5(j).
That means the evidence built for a well-documented L-1A is most of the evidence for the EB-1C. It also means the opposite is true: a thin L-1A, approved because the officer gave the company the benefit of the doubt, becomes a hard EB-1C two years later, when the same facts get read against a permanent standard.