Lawyer, Express Entry Practice Lead

CanadaVisa • Toronto, ON

7d • Hybrid

About The Position

AI is rewriting the rules of legal practice. CanadaVisa, powered by Cohen Immigration Law, is seeking a senior lawyer and operator to lead its Express Entry division. With nearly 50 years of experience in Canadian immigration law and a leading online presence, CanadaVisa processes thousands of cases annually. The firm is undergoing a significant transformation, leveraging AI-powered tools and a live operations dashboard called the Command Center. The Express Entry practice, comprising about 5 people, has recently undergone operational changes and is now focused on growth. This role is not a traditional counsel position but an opportunity to lead a key business area with potential for future business management responsibilities.

Requirements

• A licensed Canadian lawyer in good standing with a Canadian law society, eligible to practice in Canada.
• Proven leadership experience, including managing, mentoring, or supervising people, with a genuine enjoyment of team development.
• Comfortable setting expectations, giving direct feedback, making difficult decisions, and remaining calm during escalations.
• An operator mindset, caring deeply about legal quality and focusing on improving the team, process, and system.
• Commercially curious, interested in understanding the financial aspects of a legal practice (revenue, margins, capacity, staffing, growth strategy).
• Operationally minded, comfortable with metrics, dashboards, targets, capacity planning, and accountability.
• AI-native, having used tools like Claude and ChatGPT and understanding their potential for legal work.
• A systems thinker, focused on preventing recurring problems by designing scalable processes, workflows, and controls.
• A strong communicator, capable of interacting effectively with clients, lawyers, legal professionals, executives, and technical teams.
• Growth-oriented, with a drive to continuously improve and expand operations.
• Entrepreneurial spirit, seeking ownership, speed, and impact, and comfortable operating without a fully defined playbook.

Nice To Haves

• Immigration experience, particularly with PR matters.
• For exceptional lawyers from other practice areas demonstrating the required qualities, technology-enabled training systems are available to accelerate immigration expertise.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Express Entry department, owning its performance and managing a team of 5.
• Build a high-performing team by setting expectations, developing leaders, coaching, managing performance, and fostering an environment of excellence.
• Build operational resilience through clear ownership, coverage, escalation paths, and redundancy to enable scaling without key-person dependencies.
• Own operational performance using data from the Command Center to manage client response times, pipeline velocity, file throughput, capacity, quality, and client satisfaction.
• Provide senior legal leadership, ensuring high standards of legal work, offering guidance on complex matters, establishing quality control, and supporting the team with senior legal judgment.
• Drive the department from turnaround to growth by identifying and executing opportunities to increase capacity, improve conversion and client experience, expand services, and grow the practice.
• Partner with product and engineering to identify bottlenecks, automate repetitive work, and translate legal expertise into scalable workflows and technology.
• Leverage AI throughout the practice to enhance research, preparation, quality control, training, client communication, and workflow management, while maintaining rigorous legal standards.
• Hire and develop talent, determining organizational structure, recruiting, building onboarding and training, and developing future leaders.
• Codify best practices into systems, playbooks, training, and technology to strengthen the department as it scales.
• Develop toward P&L ownership by working with the General Manager to understand department economics and potentially taking on broader GM responsibilities.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Performance bonus
• Group benefits (extended health, telehealth, dental, vision)
• Unlimited paid time off
• A path beyond legal leadership, with potential development into a General Manager position.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior