Lawyer, Express Entry Practice Lead

About the Job

AI is rewriting the rules of legal practice. We're not watching — we're building.

CanadaVisa is Canada's immigration engine. Powered by Cohen Immigration Law, we've practiced Canadian immigration law for nearly 50 years and built the country's most-visited immigration site, reaching millions of people every month. We process thousands of cases a year across Express Entry, work permits, family sponsorship, citizenship, and criminal inadmissibility.

We're in the middle of a real transformation. We've built the Command Center — a live operations dashboard that gives our leaders real-time visibility into response times, pipeline velocity, file throughput, and client satisfaction. We're shipping AI-powered tools across the entire practice. And we're looking for a senior lawyer and operator to lead one of the most important parts of our business.

The Express Entry practice encompasses a team of approximately 5 people. The department has undergone significant operational transformation. The next chapter is about turning that stronger foundation into growth.

This is not a traditional counsel role. It's an opportunity to lead a meaningful part of the firm today — and potentially run it as a business tomorrow.

 

The Role

As Lawyer, EE Practice Lead , you'll have overall leadership responsibility for our Express Entry division.

You'll lead a team of approximately 5 case managers, own the department's operational performance, provide senior legal oversight, and build the systems, talent, and processes required to scale.

Initially, your mandate will be to continue strengthening the department's operational foundation: creating capacity, developing leaders, improving quality and throughput, and reducing dependency on individual team members.

From there, the mandate shifts to growth .

You'll work directly with the General Manager, Managing Attorney and executive team to identify opportunities to grow the practices, improve the client experience, deploy technology and AI, and build a department capable of serving substantially more clients without sacrificing legal quality.

For the right person, this role also offers a path toward General Manager responsibility , including ownership of the department's financial and operational performance.

We're looking for someone who wants more than a senior legal title. We want someone interested in learning how to build and ultimately run a business.

What You'll Do

• Lead the PR department. Own the performance of our Express Entry practice and lead a team of 5.

• Build a high-performing team. Set expectations, develop leaders, coach team members, manage performance, and create an environment where people can do excellent work without relying on a handful of individuals to keep everything moving.

• Build operational resilience. Create clear ownership, coverage, escalation paths, and redundancy across the department so that the organization can scale without creating key-person dependencies.

• Own operational performance. Use the Command Center and other operational data to manage client response times, pipeline velocity, file throughput, capacity, quality, and client satisfaction.

• Provide senior legal leadership. Ensure the department maintains a high standard of legal work, provide guidance on complex matters, establish quality-control processes, and support the team when issues require senior legal judgment.

• Move the department from turnaround to growth. Once the operating foundation is strong, identify and execute opportunities to increase capacity, improve conversion and client experience, expand services, and grow the practices.

• Build the machine. Partner closely with product and engineering to identify bottlenecks, automate repetitive work, and translate legal expertise into scalable workflows and technology.

• 10x the organization with AI. Use AI throughout the practice to improve research, preparation, quality control, training, client communication, and workflow management — while maintaining rigorous legal and professional standards.

• Hire and develop talent. Help determine the organizational structure the department needs as it grows, recruit lawyers and legal professionals, build onboarding and training, and develop the next generation of leaders.

• Codify how great work gets done. Turn individual expertise into systems, playbooks, training, and technology so the department gets stronger as it scales.

• Develop toward P&L ownership. Work closely with the General Manager to understand the economics of the department — revenue, staffing, capacity, margins, investment decisions, and growth — with the opportunity to take on broader GM responsibility over time.

Who You Are

• A licensed Canadian lawyer. You are a member in good standing of a Canadian law society and are eligible to practise in Canada.

• A proven leader. You've managed, mentored, or supervised people before and genuinely enjoy developing teams. You're comfortable setting expectations, giving direct feedback, making difficult decisions, and remaining calm when problems escalate.

• An operator, not just a practitioner. You care deeply about legal quality, but your thinking doesn't stop at the individual file. You naturally ask how the team, process, and system could work better.

• Commercially curious. You want to understand how a legal practice actually makes money. Revenue, margins, capacity, staffing decisions, and growth strategy interest you rather than feeling like someone else's job.

• Operationally minded. You're comfortable with metrics, dashboards, targets, capacity planning, and accountability. When something is inefficient or fragile, you want to fix the underlying system.

• AI-native. You've used tools like Claude and ChatGPT and have thought seriously about what they mean for legal work. You're excited about using AI to dramatically increase the leverage of excellent lawyers rather than simply digitizing old processes.

• A systems thinker. When you solve the same problem twice, you start asking how to prevent it from happening a third time. You think in workflows, edge cases, controls, and scalable processes.

• A strong communicator. You can communicate effectively with clients, lawyers, legal professionals, executives, and technical teams. Your written work is polished, and you're capable of bringing clarity to complicated or high-pressure situations.

• Growth-oriented. Stabilizing an operation isn't enough for you. Once something works, you immediately start thinking about how to make it better and bigger.

• Entrepreneurial. You want ownership, speed, and impact. You're comfortable operating without a perfectly defined playbook and want the opportunity to help write it.

Immigration experience is strongly preferred, particularly experience with PR matters, but we care just as much about leadership ability, judgment, operational thinking, and ambition.

For an exceptional lawyer from another area of practice who demonstrates those qualities, we've built technology-enabled training systems designed to accelerate immigration expertise.

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation + performance bonus

• Canada-based role, with Toronto hybrid preferred

• Group benefits — extended health, telehealth, dental, vision, and unlimited paid time off

• A path beyond legal leadership. For the right person, this role can develop into a General Manager position with responsibility for the financial and operational success of the department.

If you've built your career in law but find yourself increasingly interested in leadership, technology, operations, and business — and you've wondered what it would be like to actually run one — this is that opportunity.