How to Choose a Good Immigration Advisor
Bad immigration lawyers can seriously harm your life and your family’s lives. See here [refer to article above] for disaster stories that I have seen over my 19 years of practicing as a Canadian immigration lawyer.
So how can you be confident that you have an immigration advisor who will provide quality service? You should be very skeptical about what the advisor tells you unless it is verifiable by an independent party.
What should you look for in a good immigration advisor?
- Is the advisor a lawyer, or only an immigration consultant? The differences between lawyers and consultants are here.
- Does the law firm do more than just help you to get visas? See this article for other services that we provide.
- Does the lawyer have a lot of experience practicing in the field of immigration?
- Does the lawyer practice mostly immigration cases or do they only do that as a small part of their practice?
- Does the lawyer use their ability to challenge the immigration authorities by taking them to court? (Of course, consultants are not able to do this at all, but some lawyers don’t like to litigate even if they have the ability to do so.)
- Testimonials are not a great indicator of a lawyer’s quality because there may be 1000 bad opinions about a lawyer for each good one in their marketing materials. It is better if you go beyond the testimonials and ask the lawyer if you could speak directly to some of the past clients so you can ask more difficult questions.
- Be very wary of advisors who refer to their “success rates”. A success rate is not a good indicator of the quality of an advisor because it is impossible to verify and because an advisor could be taking only easy cases and refusing to take difficult cases. Often it is the more difficult cases that are the interesting issues and that would keep a quality lawyer interested in practicing in this area over a long time.
Goldman Associates are an immigration law firm and also a foreign worker employment agency, helping match foreign workers with Canadian employers. We work with workers from around the world and employers across Canada. We can also help you with your licensing and registration. Contact us today for inquiries or submit your resume so that we may see if our recruiting services can find you a job or to see if you qualify to migrate without a pre-arranged job. You may contact us as well by completing the form on the upper right side of the page.
© 2012, Goldman Associates. 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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