Immigration Lawyer (UK)

About Us. Expedite is an agentic law firm for global founders. We're London-based, serving nearly 200 startups backed by Sequoia, Index and a16z. Our corporate team is entirely ex-Cooley, our engineers are ex-founders from Palantir, Encord and YC, and we're backed by former C-suite from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind. Founded by Leeho Lim (co-founder of Encord) and Tom McGinn (ex-GC at Northzone, previously Cooley).

Read on to find out what you will need to succeed in this position, including skills, qualifications, and experience.

Most legal work is not judgment. It's assembly, retrieval, form-filling and chasing, which is why a founder waits almost 6 months and pays an unreasonable amount for something that should take much quicker. Here the assembly is done by agents and the judgment is done by excellent lawyers. This isn't a law firm that bought some AI tools.

How we work.

• No billable hours. You're measured on what clients get and how fast, not how long you sat with it.
• Your leverage is what you encode. The most valuable thing you build won't be a case. It's the readiness assessment, the evidence framework, the compliance system that lets the next hundred run without you, and you'll have engineers to build it with.
• You'll own cases end to end in your first month. No partner between you and the client.

The role. You'll own the UK side for founders and scaling teams, which for our clients usually means both sides of the Atlantic at once.

Global Talent endorsements for founders and senior engineers. Innovator Founder where it genuinely fits, and an honest conversation where it doesn't. Sponsor licences for companies opening a London office, and the compliance discipline that keeps them. Skilled Worker at volume, coded correctly. Expansion Worker for the US company sending its first two people over. The UK practice here is early enough that you'll shape what it is.

What we’re looking for.

• Currently regulated to give UK immigration advice. SRA-regulated solicitor. 2+ years, business immigration.
• Skilled Worker end to end: sponsor license applications, SMS, CoS assignment, SOC 2020 coding, going rates and current thresholds, including the instinct to verify them against live guidance before advising, because they keep moving.
• Global Talent: you've run digital technology endorsement applications and know what assessors actually reward versus what applicants think they reward.
• Innovator Founder: endorsing bodies, business plans, contact point meetings.
• Sponsor compliance: duties, record-keeping, reporting, right-to-work checks, and what a Home Office compliance visit is actually like.
• You read caseworker guidance directly, not secondary summaries.
• You use AI tools for real work already and have opinions about where they help and where they'd get a client refused.

What we offer.

• Highly competitive compensation, plus meaningful equity - you'll share in what we build.
• Fully compensated lunch and dinner - meals on us.
• Gym access - access to a company gym
• Unlimited PTO and remote working days (subject to approval).
• A front-row seat at a firm redefining the profession, working directly with the founders in our London office.

Who’s behind us. We're backed by some of the best investors in the world, including senior leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, and Lovable. We're also backed by multiple scouts from Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and Notable Capital. xwzovoh

You'll be working directly alongside both co-founders and a team of highly qualified attorneys and engineers who have founded companies that raised hundreds of millions of dollars, operated at the highest levels, and come from top law firms such as Cooley.