Lawyer, Practice Lead

Job description

**Location:** Toronto or Montreal (hybrid) **Type:** Full-time | Multiple positions available **Reports to:** Executive team **Compensation:** Competitive base + performance bonus tied to practice metrics 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 Cetner — a live operations dashboard that gives every practice lead 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 lawyers who want to lead at the intersection of legal expertise, operational excellence, and the technology that's reshaping how legal services get delivered. The goal isn't to make lawyers 10% faster. It's to rethink, from first principles, how immigration services are delivered, who can access them, and what a legal career looks like in 2026 and beyond. This isn't a traditional associate role. You'll own a practice. ## **The Role** You'll lead one of our immigration practice areas — running a team of 3–5 case managers, owning your practice's performance, and making sure every client gets fast, accurate, professional service. You'll provide legal oversight on files, handle quality control, and step in on the complex matters that need a lawyer's judgment. But your real job is leadership: keeping your team performing, your pipeline healthy, your clients happy — and partnering with our product and engineering team to automate everything that doesn't need your judgment, so your people spend their time where it actually counts. You'll have a dashboard showing your numbers in real time. You'll run daily standups. You'll hire and train your own case managers. And you'll report directly to the executive team on how your practice is doing. ## **What You'll Do** **Lead a practice of 3–5 case managers.** Set targets, run standups, coach your team, and hold them to clear performance standards. **Own your metrics.** Client response time, pipeline velocity, and client satisfaction — visible to you live in the Command Center, and yours to drive. **Provide legal oversight and quality control.** Review files before government submission and own the quality of what goes out the door. **Handle complex legal matters.** Procedural fairness letters, government requests for additional documentation, and cases that call for legal research and strategic judgment. **Build the machine.** Work side by side with our product and engineering team to find bottlenecks, suggest automations, and turn your expertise into features. When a file takes 30 minutes today, help us figure out how it takes 30 seconds tomorrow — without ever cutting corners on quality or compliance. **10x yourself with AI.** Use our tools every day to research, prepare, follow up, and manage your pipeline. You'll be among the first to run our platform in production — and when it misses a nuance, you'll catch it, document it, and help the team fix it. The lawyers who win here aren't replaced by AI; they're the ones using it to do the work of five. **Hire and codify.** Build the onboarding, playbooks, and training that let your team operate independently and let us ramp the next hire in days, not months. As you grow, the best version of what you do becomes how everyone does it. ## **Who You Are** **A licensed lawyer.** Member in good standing of the Law Society of Ontario or the Barreau du Québec. **A leader.** You've managed, mentored, or supervised before, and you're energized by developing people — not just reviewing their work. You can run a meeting, deliver feedback, and make decisions under pressure. **Operationally minded.** You think in systems, not just cases. When something is inefficient, it bothers you — and you fix it. You're comfortable with data, dashboards, and using numbers to drive decisions. **AI-native.** You've used Claude, ChatGPT, and the tools built on them, and you've thought seriously about what they mean for legal work. You don't just tolerate working alongside AI — you're already doing it, and you're excited to push it further. You know what 10x efficiency actually looks like in practice. **A systems thinker.** When you solve a problem twice, you ask why it isn't automated. You don't need to write code, but you think in workflows, edge cases, and scalable processes. **A strong communicator.** You can explain a complex situation to a nervous first-time client and make them feel confident in minutes. Your written work is polished and professional. **Startup-wired.** You want ownership, speed, and impact. You're not looking for a playbook someone else wrote — you want to write it. You thrive where the rules are still being figured out. Immigration experience is preferred but not required. We've built AI-powered training tools that get sharp people up to speed fast, and we'd rather hire killer instincts and leadership ability and teach the domain than the reverse. That mindset matters more to us than years in the field. ## **What We Offer** - Competitive base compensation plus a performance bonus tied to your practice's metrics - Hybrid work (Toronto or Montreal) - Group benefits — extended health, telehealth, dental, vision, and paid time off - **Real ownership.** You own a practice, you see your numbers, and you have the authority to make it better - **A front-row seat to the transformation of legal services** — working alongside a product and engineering team actively building the future of immigration law - **Career growth.** As the firm scales, practice leads are the natural candidates for senior leadership If you've ever looked at how law is practiced and thought *there has to be a better way* — this is your chance to prove it.