For general counsel and in-house lawyers
Sponsor licence applications, licence management and UK relocations, run as an extension of your legal team. Immigration tends to land with the in-house lawyer because there is nowhere else for it to go. It sits between HR, finance and the board. It is governed by guidance that is rewritten several times a year and takes effect on the day it is published. And it attaches personal duties to whoever the business has named as Key Personnel, who is often someone in HR who has never been told what those duties are.
We act for employers who want immigration handled by someone who does it every week, without building an internal function to do it.
You get a solicitor who stays on the matter and a director you can escalate to. Work is not passed down a chain.
Defined work is quoted as a fixed fee, so you can approve it without a conversation about hourly estimates. Volume work is quoted per unit.
What we do
Applications, including where an earlier application has been refused, where a licence has lapsed, or where the organisation does not obviously fit the profile UKVI expects. Adding routes to an existing licence. Key Personnel changes. Full detail on our sponsor licence page.
Certificate of Sponsorship allocation and assignment, allocation requests, reporting changes within the periods the guidance allows, and day to day SMS support for your Level 1 users. Where you would rather not run it at all, we run it.
Skilled Worker, Global Business Mobility including Senior or Specialist Worker, Graduate Trainee and UK Expansion Worker, Scale-up, Global Talent, High Potential Individual, dependants, and settlement when the time comes. We advise on which route actually works before anyone has promised a start date.
Mock audits before UKVI arrive rather than after, right to work processes and share code checks, and reviews of HR and personnel files against the record-keeping requirements in Appendix D.
Suspension, downgrade and revocation. Responses to compliance reports and to notices of suspension. Pre-action correspondence and judicial review where there is a public law point worth taking, and a straight answer where there is not.
Change of ownership, TUPE transfers of sponsored workers, group restructures, and the reporting and reapplication that follows. This is the one that catches businesses out, usually after completion.
How we work with in-house teams
You get a named solicitor who stays on the matter, and a director you can escalate to. Work is not passed down a chain.
Defined work is quoted as a fixed fee, so you can approve it without a conversation about hourly estimates. Volume work is quoted per unit.
We agree response times when we start and we tell you when something is going to slip, before it slips.
We deal directly with your HR, mobility or talent teams so that routine questions do not have to route through the legal function. You stay copied in and you decide what comes to you. We also run training for HR and hiring managers, which is usually cheaper than the alternative.
Getting licensed is the easy part. Staying compliant is the job.
Chris Dias, co-founder
Faith organisations, and other sponsors without a legal team
We act for churches, congregations and religious charities bringing ministers and religious workers to the UK, where the person holding the immigration file is a trustee, a general secretary or a finance officer.
The difference between a Minister of Religion and a Religious Worker turns on what the person will actually be doing once they arrive rather than on what the role is called. Using the wrong one is among the first things UKVI looks for.
Obtaining the licence is often harder for a faith organisation than for a company, because the evidence the application expects assumes Companies House filings, a trading history and a corporate bank account.
Faith organisations run on volunteers and goodwill, which is admirable, and is also why record keeping is where compliance visits in this sector tend to go wrong.
Where the duties sit with a trustee or a finance officer rather than a lawyer, we set up the systems, train the people named as Key Personnel, and stay available for the questions that come up between applications.
Panels and referrals
Lawyery Limited is regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, SRA number 8001894, and is a member of the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association. We carry professional indemnity insurance on the terms the SRA requires and will provide the certificate, our conflicts position and our data processing terms on request.
We can work to your outside counsel guidelines, your billing and matter reporting requirements, and your preferred e-billing platform. There is no minimum spend and no panel fee. Conflicts are checked before we accept instructions, not after.
Some of this comes to us from other law firms that do not practise immigration.
Lawyery acts only in immigration, employment and family law. If you refer an immigration matter to us, we will not approach your client about work outside it, and when a question belongs back with you, we will send it back with the client's authority rather than answer it ourselves.
Who you would be working with
Has practised in UK immigration since 1998 and qualified in 2001. He works primarily on sponsor licences, revocation recovery, Global Talent and Innovator Founder, and teaches the Level 2 Advanced Immigration Law course for Free Movement.
Qualified in England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland, and came to us from in-house. She was in-house counsel at the University of Sussex and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and works on sponsor licence management and compliance audits for universities and public sector bodies. She knows what it is like to be the person receiving the advice.
Fixed fees for defined work, published for the most common instructions, and quoted in advance for everything else. See our fee information, or ask us for a scoped quote on a specific piece of work.
Book a call and we will tell you what the route is, what it costs and how long it takes. Call +44 (0)20 3576 1275 or email info@lawyery.co.
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