That's right, an L-1 broadly requires one year of full-time employment (as an employee, not an independent contractor) abroad with an entity related to the U.S. in a managerial/executive capacity or specialized knowledge capacity. Both entities must be real and operating and the entity abroad must have employees other than the transferring employee and it must continue to operate during the L-1 employee's employment in the U.S. But L-1s are tough to get approved unless the employee is managing employees now and will manage employees in the U.S. or the employee's position is highly technical/specialized and ideally involves the application of proprietary knowledge.
From an outcome standpoint, things have settled down and, in my experience, nearly all approvable H-1B petitions get approved. The issue is with the high number of lottery submissions so the odds of getting selected in the H-1B lottery have been really low the past few years.
