The role

You own the client's matter from instruction to outcome. Not a stage of it. The whole of it.

If you are a private client immigration lawyer

You know the family, settlement, nationality and human rights work inside out, and you want to add business and corporate immigration to it.

Sponsor licences, licence compliance, Innovator Founder, self-sponsorship and the wider business routes are where the firm is growing, and where Home Office enforcement activity is making the work both harder and more valuable.

We will train you into it properly rather than handing you a licence application and wishing you luck.

If you are a business immigration lawyer

You may be very good at sponsor licences, Certificates of Sponsorship, Skilled Worker and global mobility, and have noticed something about that work: a great deal of it is process at volume, most of it goes through, and a meaningful part of what you do each day is exactly the sort of work that is being systematised fastest.

What you may not have had much of is the complex end: refusals, administrative review, appeals, judicial review, human rights and Article 8 arguments, long residence, overstayers, deception allegations, and cases where the answer is genuinely uncertain and somebody has to make a judgement.

If you have been quietly wondering whether your practice is broad enough to be durable, this is the conversation to have.

What you will do, either way

1. Take detailed instructions and understand the client's circumstances properly, including the parts they have not thought to mention.
2. Advise on the options genuinely open to them, and say plainly when an option is weak.
3. Devise the strategy and own it.
4. Prepare and submit applications; handle refusals, administrative review, pre-action correspondence and onward challenge where appropriate.
5. Act as the client's lawyer throughout, and be the person they can actually reach.
6. Work to the fee agreed at the outset.

What we require

A strong grounding on one side of the practice, private client or business, and a genuine appetite for the other.

We will want to see real depth somewhere. For private client applicants that means in-country and out-of-country work across the partner routes and their extensions, and ideally exposure to refusals and appeals.

For business applicants that means Skilled Worker and sponsor licence work of some volume, and ideally compliance or licence-jeopardy experience.

What you get

What you will do

You are the first lawyer a client speaks to.

1. Take first contact from people who have approached the firm by telephone, WhatsApp, email and web enquiry, and do it quickly. In this market the firm that answers first very often wins, and we treat that as a professional obligation rather than a sales tactic.
2. Take instructions properly. Circumstances, immigration history, documents, dates, dependants, and the thing they have not told you yet.
3. Diagnose. Work out which route or routes are genuinely open, whether any deadline is already running that the client has not noticed, and whether the case is strong, weak, or not yet ready.
4. Advise, within your competence, and be exact about your confidence. We train a three-level model for this: what is on the page, your trained view marked as such, and what you will go and find out. The single rule is that you never leave an uncertain answer sounding certain.
5. Scope and price the work, explain what the firm will do, and put the quote in writing.
6. Ask for the instruction.
7. Hand over to the caseworker who will run the matter, and stay involved.
8. Record what happened honestly, including when we lost the client and why.
9. Then the finishing-school part, where you will learn to process a case from start to finish using technology and your newly acquired client-management skills to ensure success.

Read this before you apply

When a client decides to instruct us, you are the person who asks them to. That is selling, and we are not going to call it something else.

It is not a call centre, it is not a script, and there is no cold calling. You speak to people who have contacted us. But the commercial element is real and it is a permanent part of the job, not a phase you are moved out of.

Our reasoning is in the addendum below. If, having read it, the commercial element is something you would resent, this is not the job for you, and we would far rather you concluded that now than in month three.

That is the same principle we apply to clients: we tell people when we are not the right answer for them.

The question you should be asking

Every firm offering a training route says the training is real. The only useful test is whether people have actually come out of the other end of it.

This is not a route we are announcing. It is how this firm has staffed itself for years, and the Immigration Advisor role is the current version of it.

Ask about it at interview.

Qualifying as a solicitor

This role is qualifying work experience.

Under the SQE route you need two years' full-time equivalent qualifying work experience. It must involve providing legal services and give you the opportunity to develop competences from the SRA's Statement of Solicitor Competence.

It does not require a training contract, it can be accrued across up to four organisations, and it can be gained before, during or after you sit SQE1 and SQE2. It is confirmed by a solicitor of England and Wales, or by a compliance officer for legal practice.

The Immigration Advisor role meets that standard, and we say so having taken it through our own compliance officer and our senior lawyers rather than assuming it.

You take instructions, advise clients, identify routes, assess evidence and manage client relationships. That is legal services, performed under supervision, with the competences documented as you go.

Our commitments:

1. Your QWE is recorded from day one, against the SRA competences, rather than reconstructed from memory two years later.
2. It is confirmed by our compliance officer for legal practice.
3. Supervision by named, qualified lawyers, structured around the competences you still need rather than whatever work happens to be in.

We have advisors on this route now.

And the IAA route, alongside it

You will also be accredited by the Immigration Advice Authority, funded by the firm.

That is a regulated qualification in its own right and it is the one that lets you advise. Until you are accredited your face-to-face client contact is supervised, a regulatory requirement we treat as a training asset rather than a formality.

Once accredited, your registration number goes in your email signature.

Some of our advisors qualify as solicitors. Some build a career as senior immigration advisors and never sit the SQE. Both are real destinations here and neither is the consolation prize.

Who this suits

Somebody who wanted to be a lawyer for the part where you help a person in serious trouble, and who has noticed what is happening to the work that juniors are traditionally hired to do.

Somebody who can be told they are wrong every week without it costing them anything. Somebody who can hold a difficult conversation without flinching or bulldozing.

Who it does not suit

Somebody who wants a purely back-office start. Somebody who would find "we are the firm that tells clients not to proceed" naive rather than commercially interesting.

Somebody looking for the traditional research-and-bundling apprenticeship. We think that apprenticeship is disappearing, which is the whole subject of the addendum.