My lawyer said, according to the recent discussion with American Immigration Lawyers Association, some DOL officers are working on non-RIR cases while others are struggling with new PERM rules. They need to have regular cases catch up with RIR cases since there will be neither regular nor RIR processing after PERM is implemented. (planed to be implemented in Oct.)
However, the PERM regulation they plan to use is problematic. For example, it requires all the employers to attend job fairs before they send on their PERM applications. As we all know, it's impossible for small companies to recruit people in the job fair. And even for big companies, if they only have 1 or 2 openings, they wouldn't have a recruitment through the job fair either. AILA's lawyers criticize those people in DOL don't live in the real world and if they won't revise the planned regulation, it will be extremely hard to get a LC through PERM.
And for those who are desperate for the RIR approvals like us, since nobody in DOL has any solutions for the backlogs yet, the only thing we can do is wait wait and wait. However, when PERM comes up, our destiny could be much worse than ever.