What does your week look like?

[3rdPerson]

What does your bread and butter client look like?

How specialized do firms get?

Are there lots of sole practitioners?

Could you afford to live in Toronto with only legal aid cases?

Are the working hours and stress as poor as criminal defence?

Is the business just about volume and/or cornering the market on specific language/racial groups? 

The best part of your week?

Edited August 6, 2021 by 3rdPerson

[Thrive92]

12 minutes ago, 3rdPerson said:

Are the working hours and stress as poor as criminal defence?

I know that criminal defense lawyers don't make alot of money relative to their biglaw counterparts, but in terms of stress and and the working hours, isnt criminal defense just so - so compared to other legal fields?

[3rdPerson]

54 minutes ago, Thrive92 said:

I know that criminal defense lawyers don't make alot of money relative to their biglaw counterparts, but in terms of stress and and the working hours, isnt criminal defense just so - so compared to other legal fields?

Maybe? All I know is that the criminal defence lawyers I have spoken to (not new calls) work 60+ hours, are on call almost all the time, and have unpredicatable income streams and workflow. From the everyday person's point of view I'd call that pretty poor.

I'm sure biglaw has altogether different kinds of difficulties... but the comparison I made is more interesting to me.

[Zenith]

On 8/5/2021 at 6:20 PM, 3rdPerson said:

1. What does your bread and butter client look like?

2. How specialized do firms get?

3. Are there lots of sole practitioners?

4. Could you afford to live in Toronto with only legal aid cases?

5. Are the working hours and stress as poor as criminal defence?

6. Is the business just about volume and/or cornering the market on specific language/racial groups? 

7. The best part of your week?

Since no one is biting, I will take this one:

1. I practice corporate immigration and all my firm clients are large employers.

2. At my current firm, it is pretty much just corporate immigration (i.e. helping employees obtain/maintain work authorization/PR/green card, albeit from an employer-driven perspective). At smaller-sized firms, you do the same thing, but the primary focus would probably be on family immigration cases (e.g. helping a Canadian individual sponsor their foreign relative). There are also other more specialized immigration areas such as refugee protection/crimmigration/immigration litigation (tribunal/Fed court) - I do not practice them, and so I cannot really comment. To my understanding, outside large/established corporate immigration firms, most immigration practitioners will practice a mix of these immigration areas as opposed to just one. Crimmigration (the intersection between criminal law and immigration law) is probably the most difficult area in immigration, but some immigration practitioners choose to specialize in this area and they are really successful.

3. Yes.

4. Cannot comment since I have not done legal aid.

5. Don't know about my criminal defence colleagues, but I work about 40 to 50 hours per week. This is really a soft cap I put for myself after making sure I still reach my yearly target. If I want, I can always work more hours. I don't find my work stressful since I actually like immigration law. When I started initially, the amount of work was overwhelming; however, this is not so much the case now since I am at a career level where I get to delegate work to assistants/junior lawyers.

6. For corporate immigration, it is about volume. Outside corporate immigration, I guess some practitioners are successful in certain foreign language/racial groups though I don't know many. In my opinion , having foreign language proficiency or belonging to certain racial group has less value in immigration law than one might believe. At the end of the day, clients will hire someone who they trust has the legal competency to handle their work; they are not going to really care about what language/racial background you have. If there is any doubt, you can always just hire a foreign language speaker to do the marketing for you. I would say this is particularly important for new calls/juniors to know, since the immigration market can be very tough/unprofitable for new calls/juniors and even for sole practitioners. Instead of trying to cater to a certain language speaking/racial group, I would say focus on building your expertise in a certain area (e.g. crimmigration/litigation/policy advocacy etc.) that will generate referrals from other lawyers.

7. Seeing case approvals/Friday afternoon.

 

[123]

On 8/5/2021 at 9:20 PM, 3rdPerson said:

Could you afford to live in Toronto with only legal aid cases?

You can. How difficult it is depends on your personal circumstances, though. It's not overly difficult to survive on LAO as a single person -- you can live in Toronto on $50,000.00 per year, which is quite doable with a reasonably busy LAO practice. It's a lot more difficult if you have other financial obligations. Childcare costs, in particular, would make a pure LAO immigration practice more challenging. After a while though, you probably don't need to run a practice on just LAO certificates. As far as I know, most immigration and refugee lawyers can land some private files. 

On 8/5/2021 at 9:20 PM, 3rdPerson said:

Is the business just about volume and/or cornering the market on specific language/racial groups? 

On 9/5/2021 at 4:03 AM, Zenith said:

I guess some practitioners are successful in certain foreign language/racial groups though I don't know many. In my opinion , having foreign language proficiency or belonging to certain racial group has less value in immigration law than one might believe. At the end of the day, clients will hire someone who they trust has the legal competency to handle their work; they are not going to really care about what language/racial background you have. If there is any doubt, you can always just hire a foreign language speaker to do the marketing for you. I would say this is particularly important for new calls/juniors to know, since the immigration market can be very tough/unprofitable for new calls/juniors and even for sole practitioners. Instead of trying to cater to a certain language speaking/racial group, I would say focus on building your expertise in a certain area (e.g. crimmigration/litigation/policy advocacy etc.) that will generate referrals from other lawyers.

From a pure business perspective, I'm not sure I would entirely agree with @Zenith (although, any disagreement probably comes from differences between business and non-business law). I do know lawyers and consultants running pretty profitable practices, catering to a linguistic or ethnic group, without having a particularly high level of competence. I find clients, especially the less sophisticated ones you find outside of business immigration, aren't really able to judge the competence of counsel. They'll often stick with a lawyer for years, through an initial claim or application, an appeal, and maybe even a subsequent different application. From a business perspective, you can do pretty well by speaking Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, etc., and having good client skills. But yes, the bar will start to notice if you're relying on that. Other lawyers will see your shitty applications, when they take over the case for a judicial review or new application. 

On the original question, there are practices run those two ways. If you value being competent, you're probably looking to keep the volume down by attracting better-paying clients, so that the quality of work doesn't suffer. And you wouldn't just be cornering the marker on ethnic groups. You'd be building a referral network based upon doing quality, timely work.