How to Change Your Immigration Lawyer in Australia

How do you change your immigration lawyer in Australia?

You change your immigration lawyer in Australia by signing a new Form 956 for the new lawyer and making sure the previous appointment is formally ended with the Department of Home Affairs. Both steps matter. The first one puts the new lawyer on the file. The second one stops the Department sending your mail to someone who is no longer acting for you.

There is no application to make and no permission to obtain. You do not have to give a reason, and you do not have to wait for a particular stage of processing. A client may change representative at any point, including the day before a decision is made.

Nothing about the visa application itself changes when you change representative. The application keeps its original lodgement date. It keeps its place in the processing queue. Every deadline that already applies to it continues to run on exactly the same dates. Changing lawyer does not restart processing, does not reset a deadline, and does not create a fresh opportunity to lodge something late.

The order of the steps is what protects the matter. Engage the new lawyer first and let that lawyer read the file before anything is filed with the Department. A client who ends the old appointment before a new lawyer has agreed to act is left as the authorised recipient by default, often in the middle of a request for information, and that is where deadlines are missed. My Migration Lawyers takes new matters from previous representatives regularly, and the sequence below is the part clients most often get the wrong way around.

Where the matter is a partner visa or a protection visa, the practical first question is not the paperwork at all. It is what the file actually contains and what has already been said to the Department. A change of representative is the right moment for that review, because it is the last point at which a claim can usually be corrected before a decision. You can request a consultation online and have the file assessed before any form is signed.

Do you need your current lawyer's permission to change?

No. A client may end a lawyer's engagement at any time, and the outgoing lawyer or agent cannot refuse, delay or veto the change. Under the Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules, a law practice completes the legal services for a matter unless, among other things, the practice is discharged from the engagement by the client. Discharge is the client's decision alone.

The Migration Act 1958 puts the same control in the client's hands for the part that matters most, which is where the Department sends documents. Section 494D(3) provides that "the first person (but not the authorised recipient) may vary or withdraw the notice under subsection (1) at any time, but must not (unless the regulations provide otherwise) vary the notice so that any more than one person becomes the first person's authorised recipient".

Two consequences follow from that provision, and both are worth understanding before anything is signed.

The first is that no previous representative can block the change. The authority to receive your documents is yours to withdraw, not theirs to keep.

The second is less comfortable. Because only the applicant can vary or withdraw that notice, a new lawyer cannot quietly take over the correspondence on your behalf. Your signature is required. If a client signs a new appointment but never deals with the earlier authorised recipient appointment, the Department is left with a notice on file that has not been varied or withdrawn, and the Act allows only one authorised recipient at a time.

In practice, a cooperative handover is faster and cheaper. An outgoing representative who confirms the end of the appointment, returns the file and states plainly what has been lodged saves the client a great deal of work. That cooperation is useful. It is not a requirement, and a change should never be delayed while waiting for it.

What Form 956 does, and why it controls your matter

Form 956 is the Department of Home Affairs form titled "Appointment of a registered migration agent, legal practitioner or exempt person", and it does two separate jobs that clients routinely treat as one. The first job is to appoint someone to provide immigration assistance, which means using knowledge or experience in migration procedure to assist with matters arising under the Migration Act 1958. The second job, at question 17 of the form, is to appoint that person as the authorised recipient for the matter.

Those two appointments are not the same thing, and they do not have to sit with the same person. Form 956A, "Appointment or withdrawal of an authorised recipient", is the form used where a person is only receiving documents and is not giving immigration assistance at all.

Three features of Form 956 catch people out on a change of representative.

A separate Form 956 is required for each matter. A single form does not carry across a visa application, a review and a separate sponsorship matter. Where more than one matter is on foot, each one needs its own appointment.

Everyone listed on the form is treated as having made the same appointment. The form states that all persons listed are considered to have appointed the same person to provide immigration assistance, and as authorised recipient where indicated. Dependent applicants are covered by the one form rather than by separate paperwork.

The form is also the instrument used to end an appointment. Part B records that an appointment has ended, and where the authorised recipient appointment is being withdrawn, the client completes the declaration at Part C to confirm that the withdrawal is made with the client's authority. The Department accepts a letter from the client instead, and it accepts Form 956A. What it will not do is infer the withdrawal from silence.

That is the single most common error in a change of representative. Signing a new Form 956 for the new lawyer is not, by itself, a withdrawal of the old authorised recipient appointment. The new appointment and the withdrawal are two entries on the Department's record, and both have to be made.

What happens to your deadlines when you change lawyers?

Nothing happens to your deadlines. They do not pause, extend or restart because a representative has changed. This is the point on which a change of representative most often does real damage, and it is worth setting out the mechanism rather than the warning.

Section 494D(1) of the Migration Act 1958 provides that where a person gives the Minister written notice of the name and address of an authorised recipient, "the Minister must give the authorised recipient, instead of the first person, any documents in connection with those matters that the Minister would otherwise have given to the first person". Section 494D(2) then provides that "if the Minister gives a document to the authorised recipient, the Minister is taken to have given the document to the first person".

Read those two subsections together. While the earlier notice stands, the Department is obliged to send your documents to the previous representative, and you are treated in law as having received whatever is sent there. It does not matter that you never saw the letter. It does not matter that the relationship had broken down months earlier. Sections 494B and 494C set out the methods by which the Department gives documents and the time at which a document is taken to have been received, and neither provision asks whether the document actually reached the applicant.

The documents that go astray in this situation are the ones that carry consequences. A request for further information under section 56 of the Migration Act 1958 sets a period for a response, and an application can be decided on the material available once that period ends. A notice of refusal starts the clock on review rights. Review deadlines in migration matters are short and strictly applied, and there is no general discretion to extend them because a client had changed lawyers and did not receive the letter.

So the first task on any change of representative is not the file and not the strategy. It is to correct the Department's record of where correspondence goes, and to establish what has already been sent there. A new lawyer will normally check whether a request for information or a decision notice is already outstanding before touching anything else. Where a refusal has already been notified, the review position should be assessed immediately, because the deadline is running whether or not anyone has read the notice. The firm's guidance on what to do after a visa refusal sets out the review options and the way the timing works.

Changing representative during an Administrative Review Tribunal review

Telling the Department is not telling the Tribunal. The Department of Home Affairs and the Administrative Review Tribunal keep separate records, and a Form 956 lodged with the Department does nothing at all in a review before the Tribunal. Where a review is on foot, the Tribunal must be notified separately and in writing.

The Tribunal's form for this is form MR5, "Appointment of representative". It can be used to appoint a representative, to appoint an authorised recipient, or to appoint the same person to both roles, and the form asks the applicant to identify the type of representative, including a registered migration agent or an Australian lawyer who holds a practising certificate. The form states the obligation plainly: "You must inform us immediately in writing, if you change your representative, cancel your representative's authority to act on your behalf, or if your representative's contact details change."

Immediately is the operative word. A Tribunal review runs to a timetable of directions, submissions and a hearing date, and the Tribunal communicates with the representative it has on record. A client who has changed lawyers but not told the Tribunal can be perfectly diligent and still miss a hearing.

Two further points matter for reviews.

Since the Administrative Review Tribunal replaced the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, reviewable migration decisions and reviewable protection decisions both sit within Part 5 of the Migration Act 1958. The separate Part 7 stream that used to govern protection reviews no longer exists. Section 379G of the Migration Act 1958 is the authorised recipient provision that applies to a review, and it sits in the Part 5 division dealing with giving and receiving documents.

A hearing date does not move because a new lawyer has come on the record. An adjournment is a matter for the Tribunal to decide, and a late change of representative is not on its own a reason to grant one. Where a hearing is close, the honest advice is often that the new lawyer works to the existing date rather than assuming it can be shifted. Protection matters are the clearest example, because the hearing is usually where the claims are tested, and a protection visa refusal review turns on preparation that cannot be compressed into a few days.

Can the previous lawyer keep your file until you pay?

Yes, in limited circumstances, and only over documents. A solicitor may claim a lien over client documents for unpaid legal costs, and the Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules build the client's entitlement around that possibility rather than overriding it.

Rule 14.1 of the Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules requires a solicitor with designated responsibility for a client's matter to ensure that, on completion or termination of the engagement, the client or a person authorised by the client "is given any client documents, (or if they are electronic documents copies of those documents), as soon as reasonably possible when requested to do so by the client, unless there is an effective lien". The qualification at the end of that rule is the part that matters when fees are in dispute.

Rule 15.1 then deals with the harder case, where the documents are essential to current proceedings. Where a solicitor claims a lien for unpaid legal costs over documents that are essential to the client's defence or prosecution of current proceedings, and another solicitor is acting, the first solicitor must surrender the documents to the second solicitor where the second solicitor undertakes to hold them subject to the lien and with reasonable security for the unpaid costs, or where the first solicitor agrees to arrangements for payment of those costs on completion of the proceedings. Alternatively, on receiving reasonable security for the unpaid costs, the solicitor must deliver the documents to the client.

In practice, a lien is far less disabling than it sounds, for three reasons.

Your own documents remain yours. A passport, a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, payslips, bank statements, photographs, medical records and the statements written by your family and friends were never the previous representative's property. A lien over the file does not reach them, and in most matters they can be produced again from the original source.

The Department holds the application. What was lodged, and every document attached to it, sits on the Department's record as well as on the representative's file. Where the previous file cannot be obtained, a copy of the material held by the Department can be sought directly, including under freedom of information.

Time limits apply to the file itself. Rule 14.2 permits a solicitor or law practice to destroy client documents after a period of seven years has elapsed since the completion or termination of the engagement, unless client instructions or legislation require otherwise. A file from an older matter may simply no longer exist, which is a reason to ask for it early rather than a reason to delay a change.

What you still owe the previous lawyer or agent

Ending an engagement does not cancel the costs already incurred under it. The work done before the change remains payable on the terms of the agreement that was signed, and a client who walks away without addressing the account usually meets it again later, either as an invoice or as a lien over the file.

The costs agreement is the document to read first. Where the arrangement was a fixed fee for a matter, the question is what stage the matter had reached and what that agreement says about work completed to date. Where the arrangement was charged by time, an itemised account should be requested so the charges can be checked against what is actually on the file. A request for an itemised account is an ordinary client entitlement and is not an accusation.

Government charges are a separate category and are not affected by the change. A visa application charge paid to the Department was paid to the Commonwealth, not to the representative, and it is not refunded because a representative changed. The same applies to fees already paid to the Tribunal. Nothing about the change of representative re-opens those payments.

Where a client genuinely disputes what has been charged, the dispute belongs in the costs process for the profession concerned rather than in the visa matter. The two should be kept apart. A costs dispute that is allowed to delay the substantive work is the worst of both outcomes, because the deadline in the visa matter will not wait for the billing question to be resolved.

How to change representative without losing ground

The change itself is straightforward. Losing ground during it is what a client needs to avoid, and the order of the steps is what prevents that.

Get the second opinion before ending anything. A new lawyer should read what was lodged, what the Department has asked for and what has been said in response, and should say plainly whether a change actually helps. Sometimes it does not, and a client is better served by the representative already on the record finishing the work.

Establish what is outstanding on the day of the change. This means identifying any request for information and its response date, any decision already notified, any review deadline running, and any Tribunal direction or hearing date. Those dates govern everything that follows.

Sign the new Form 956 and record the withdrawal of the previous appointment in the same step, so that the Department's record shows one current representative and one current authorised recipient. If a review is on foot, notify the Tribunal separately using its own form.

Ask for the file in writing, and do not wait for it before doing urgent work. Where a response is due in days, the new lawyer reconstructs what is needed from the client's own documents and the Department's record rather than holding the matter open while a file is negotiated.

Confirm that correspondence is arriving in the right place. Once the change is made, the Department's record should be checked so that the client is not relying on an assumption. This is also the moment to bring contact details up to date, since an out of date email address produces the same outcome as an out of date representative.

My Migration Lawyers acts in partner visa and protection visa matters, including refusals and reviews, and takes over matters from previous representatives as a matter of course. The Principal, Weiwei Zhang, reviews the file before the appointment is made rather than after it, so that the advice on whether to change is given on the facts of the matter rather than on the strength of a complaint. Details of how the firm works and who acts on matters are set out on the about page, and matters are taken across Australia by video conference. Where the matter is a partner visa, the firm's partner visa lawyers page sets out the subclasses covered and what the work involves.