Booking an Immigration Lawyer Consultation: Fees, Advice and Next Steps

What happens in an immigration lawyer consultation?

An immigration lawyer consultation is a paid appointment in which an Australian legal practitioner reviews a person's immigration status and history, identifies the legal problems in the matter, and states which visa or review pathways remain open and which are closed. It is legal advice on a specific set of facts. It is not a sales meeting, and it is not a form filling session.

The appointment normally works in three stages. The first stage is status. The lawyer establishes what visa the person holds, when it ceases, what conditions are attached to it, whether any application has been refused or any visa cancelled, and whether the person has been notified of a decision. This part is not administrative detail. Almost every bar in the Migration Act 1958 turns on immigration status at the moment an application is made, so nothing useful can be advised until status is settled.

The second stage is the legal question itself. In a partner visa matter, that means whether the relationship meets the definition of spouse in section 5F of the Act or de facto partner in section 5CB, and how the four matters a decision maker must consider under regulation 1.15A apply to the couple. Those four matters are the financial aspects of the relationship, the nature of the household, the social aspects of the relationship, and the nature of the persons' commitment to each other. In a protection visa matter, it means whether the claims fall within the refugee criterion in section 36(2)(a) or the complementary protection criterion in section 36(2)(aa), and which of the exclusions in section 36(2B) the Department is likely to raise.

The third stage is sequence. A person usually arrives with one question and leaves with an order of operations: what must be lodged first, what must be lodged before a date, what evidence has to be gathered, and what should not be sent to the Department at all. Sequence is often the part that decides a matter, because an application lodged in the wrong order can be invalid rather than merely weak.

A consultation is also the point at which a person finds out that the question they asked is not the question that matters. Someone who books to ask how long a visa takes to process may discover that a condition on the current visa prevents the application being made in Australia at all. That reframing is the value of the appointment.

How much does an immigration lawyer consultation cost in Australia?

Most Australian immigration lawyers charge a set fee for an initial consultation, and that fee is quoted before the appointment is booked.

The important point is that two separate fees exist, and confusing them is the most common mistake people make when comparing firms. The first is the fee for the consultation. It buys the practitioner's time and the advice given. The second is the fee for the work on the matter, if the person decides to proceed. That second fee cannot honestly be quoted until the lawyer knows what the matter involves. A fixed price offered for a visa application before anyone has looked at the immigration history is a price set without knowledge of the facts.

Anyone comparing quotes should also separate professional fees from government charges. The visa application charge is set by the Department of Home Affairs and is payable whoever prepares the application. Tribunal application fees are set by the Administrative Review Tribunal. Those charges are not part of what a lawyer is paid, and they change from time to time, so they should always be checked against the Department or the Tribunal rather than a third party website.

An Australian law practice also has statutory obligations about costs. Under the Legal Profession Uniform Law, a practice must disclose the basis on which its legal costs will be calculated and give an estimate of the total legal costs, and it must tell the client if anything previously disclosed changes significantly. The practical consequence is simple. A person engaging an immigration lawyer should expect a written costs disclosure and a written costs agreement before the work begins, and should not rely on a figure mentioned in conversation.

Five questions are worth asking before booking anything. Is the consultation fee separate from the fee for the matter. What exactly is included in the fee for the matter, and what falls outside it. What events trigger an additional fee, such as a request for further information, a Tribunal application or a second interview. When does each payment fall due. And who pays the government charge, and at what point.

My Migration Lawyers works on fixed fees for each matter, set out in a written costs agreement before any work starts, with the phases and the amount for each phase stated in the agreement. A person who decides not to proceed after the consultation keeps the advice and owes nothing further.

What should a person prepare before an immigration lawyer consultation?

The passport, any letter or decision record received from the Department of Home Affairs or the Administrative Review Tribunal, and the key dates. That is enough for a first consultation, and assembling more than that is usually wasted effort.

People often delay booking because they believe they must first reconstruct an entire immigration file. They cannot find an old bridging visa grant notice, or a copy of an application lodged years ago by a previous representative, so they postpone the appointment while a deadline runs. That is the wrong order. My Migration Lawyers checks the visa record itself through VEVO using the passport details already provided, so old grant notices do not need to be found before the consultation can take place. The details needed to arrange the appointment are collected on the firm's consultation request form.

What genuinely helps is accuracy about dates and events. The date of arrival in Australia. The date any application was lodged. The date of any refusal or cancellation, and the date and method by which notice of it was given, because notification by email and notification by post are treated differently and review periods run from deemed receipt rather than from the day a letter is opened. Any previous applications, refusals or cancellations, including ones the person believes are irrelevant. Any previous agent or lawyer, and whether that appointment has ended.

The single most useful document is the decision record for any refusal, because it names the criterion that was not met and the findings made. Advice given without it is advice given about a guess.

Candour matters more than paperwork. A lawyer needs the adverse facts, including the ones a person is embarrassed by. A difficult fact disclosed at the consultation can be addressed, explained or weighed against the rest of the case. The same fact discovered later by the Department, after a document or statement has been put in that does not match it, is a different problem entirely, and the integrity criteria in the Migration Regulations 1994 are unforgiving on that point.

What can a lawyer work out in a first consultation?

A first consultation should establish four things: whether the person is barred from making a further application, which pathway remains open, which criterion the matter will actually turn on, and whether a deadline is already running. Those four answers are what separate legal advice from general information, and none of them can be found on a checklist.

### Bars on making a further application

Section 48 of the Migration Act 1958 limits further applications by a person who is in Australia, does not hold a substantive visa, and has had a visa refused or cancelled since last entering the country. Only the visa classes prescribed by regulation 2.12 of the Migration Regulations 1994 may be applied for. This is narrower than most people expect, and wider than they fear. A refusal does not end everything, because partner and protection applications remain available to a person affected by section 48.

A person affected by section 48 who applies for a partner visa in Australia faces extra validity requirements under item 1124B of Schedule 1, including a completed sponsorship form lodged at the same time and two supporting declarations from Australian citizens, permanent residents or eligible New Zealand citizens who are not the sponsor, each made no more than six weeks before the application. An application that misses one of those requirements is invalid, not merely weak. It is not refused. It never existed, and the fee and the time are gone with it.

Section 48A is a different and far more serious bar. It prevents a person who has had a protection visa application refused while in Australia from making a further protection visa application. Only the Minister can lift it, under section 48B, and that power is personal and cannot be compelled. Section 46A operates in a similar way for unauthorised maritime arrivals. A lawyer asks about earlier protection applications at the first consultation for exactly this reason, and the answer changes the advice completely.

Condition 8503, the no further stay condition, is the point most often misstated in public material. Where 8503 is attached to a visa, the holder cannot be granted a further substantive visa while in Australia unless the condition is waived, which blocks onshore partner, student and skilled applications. Schedule 8 expressly carves protection visas out of 8503, and out of 8534 and 8535 as well. A person holding a visa with a no further stay condition can lodge a protection visa application in Australia without any waiver. Advice to the contrary is wrong.

### Criteria that are already in play

Schedule 3 applies where a person applies for a partner visa in Australia without holding a substantive visa. Criteria 3001, 3003 and 3004 then have to be met, or the Minister must be satisfied that there are compelling reasons for not applying them. Whether compelling reasons exist is a question of evidence and argument, and it is decided on the material put forward at the time of decision. It is one of the clearest examples of a matter where advice before lodgement changes what can be argued later.

Public interest criterion 4020 in Schedule 4 to the Migration Regulations 1994 is the integrity criterion. It is not met where there is evidence that the applicant gave, or caused to be given, a bogus document or information that is false or misleading in a material particular, in relation to the current application or a visa held in the twelve months before the application was made. A refusal under that ground carries a three year non grant period under PIC 4020(2), which may be waived under PIC 4020(4) where there are compelling circumstances affecting the interests of Australia, or compelling or compassionate circumstances affecting an Australian citizen, permanent resident or eligible New Zealand citizen. A refusal for failure to satisfy the decision maker as to identity carries a ten year non grant period under PIC 4020(2B), and there is no waiver for that one at all.

In protection matters the criteria carry their own traps. Section 36(2A) sets out a closed list of what counts as significant harm for complementary protection, and harm that falls outside that list does not qualify however serious it is. Section 36(2B) then removes the claim where the person could reasonably relocate within the country, where effective state protection is available, or where the risk faced is one faced by the population generally. A consultation is where those questions are asked, long before a statement is written.

### Deadlines that may already be running

A refusal or a cancellation starts a review period, and those periods are short and strictly applied. The period for applying to the Administrative Review Tribunal after a protection visa refusal cannot be extended by the Tribunal at all. It runs from the day the applicant is taken to have received the decision, not the day the letter was opened, so a person who was overseas, or who did not check the email address given to the Department, may have less time remaining than they believe.

Anyone who has received a refusal should treat the visa refusal as the urgent item and everything else as secondary. The same applies to a protection visa refusal, where the deadline is the tightest in the system. Booking a consultation after the review period has expired removes the best option that existed, and no amount of later work restores it.

Can an immigration lawyer say whether a visa will be granted?

No. No lawyer can promise an outcome, and a practitioner who offers one is describing something they cannot know. The decision is made by a delegate of the Minister under section 65 of the Migration Act 1958, on the material before the delegate at the time of decision, and it is subject to the delegate's own findings of fact.

What a lawyer can do is set out the criteria that apply, identify which of them are likely to be contested, name the evidence that is missing, and explain what the Department's published policy says about how the criterion is assessed. That is a far more useful thing than a prediction, because it tells a person what they can change.

It also means a consultation sometimes ends with unwelcome advice. Sometimes the correct answer is that no pathway is available, or that the only pathway carries a real risk of refusal, or that a person is better off leaving Australia and applying offshore. Advice that only contains encouragement is worthless, and giving it would be a professional failure.

One further point belongs here, because it is misunderstood. A lawyer does not invent a case. My Migration Lawyers presents the client's own account and the client's own evidence in the form the law requires, and a written statement remains the client's evidence, reviewed and corrected by the client before it is signed. The client decides which claims are advanced. What legal work adds is structure, the correct statutory framing, and the removal of material that would do damage.

Is one consultation enough, or is ongoing representation needed?

For many matters one consultation is enough. A person who needs to know whether a condition blocks an onshore application, whether a relationship has been together long enough to lodge, or whether a lodged application is missing something important, can get that answered in a single appointment and act on it alone.

Ongoing representation earns its cost where the matter has a legal problem rather than an administrative one. Matters in that category include a refusal with a review to the Administrative Review Tribunal, an application that requires a Schedule 3 waiver, an application made under section 48, any matter where public interest criterion 4020 has been raised, a protection claim of any kind, and a partner application continuing under the family violence provisions in Division 1.5 of the Migration Regulations 1994. In each of those, the outcome depends on how the case is framed and evidenced, not on whether the form is complete.

The choice is made at the consultation, with the price for the work in front of the person, and there is no obligation to proceed. A person who wants a second opinion on a matter already lodged by someone else is in the same position, and is entitled to take the advice and do nothing with it.

What happens after an immigration lawyer consultation?

Three things follow a consultation: written advice, a written costs agreement if the person decides the firm should act, and a short list of what has to be done next and by when. Advice that exists only in the memory of a video call is of limited use, because the detail that matters is usually a date or a criterion number.

At My Migration Lawyers the advice is confirmed in a letter of advice. It sets out the pathway that applies, the criteria the application will be assessed against, the evidence the client will need to produce, and the risks that were identified. A person who chooses not to engage the firm keeps that letter and can use it however they wish, including to brief someone else.

If the firm is engaged, a written costs agreement follows. It states the fixed fee for each phase of the matter, what each phase covers and what falls outside it. Work begins after the agreement is signed, not before.

The other document that appears at this stage is Form 956. Form 956 is the approved form for appointing a migration representative, and it covers an Australian legal practitioner as well as a registered migration agent. It can also appoint the representative as the authorised recipient, in which case the Department sends written communication about the matter to that person, and the communication is taken to have been received by the applicant. Form 956A appoints an authorised recipient alone. This is not paperwork for its own sake. Because review periods run from deemed receipt, who receives the Department's correspondence determines when the clock starts.

Is a lawyer required, or is a registered migration agent enough?

Both may act. Under Part 3 of the Migration Act 1958, immigration assistance may be given by a registered migration agent or by an Australian legal practitioner. Registered migration agents are registered with the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority and are bound by the Code of Conduct made under the Act. Australian legal practitioners with an unrestricted practising certificate sit outside that registration scheme and are regulated instead by the legal services regulator in their state or territory. Form 956 appoints either of them.

The practical difference is in the kind of problem being solved. A matter that is essentially an application, correctly prepared and properly evidenced, is work that a competent registered agent does every day. A matter that turns on the construction of a statutory criterion, on an argument before the Administrative Review Tribunal, or on a question of law sitting alongside the visa problem, is legal work and is better placed with a lawyer.

Two further points are worth knowing. Communications with an Australian legal practitioner made for the dominant purpose of obtaining legal advice attract legal professional privilege. And a law practice is subject to the costs disclosure and costs agreement requirements of the Legal Profession Uniform Law, which is why a person engaging a lawyer should expect the fee structure in writing before work starts.

How My Migration Lawyers runs a consultation

My Migration Lawyers holds consultations by video, Australia wide, and arranges them through the consultation request form rather than by telephone. The firm is led by Weiwei Zhang, Principal Lawyer, and acts in partner visas, protection visas and refusals of both, including review before the Administrative Review Tribunal.

Before the appointment, the firm checks the visa record through VEVO using the passport details supplied with the request, so the consultation begins with immigration status already established rather than spending the first fifteen minutes working it out. Any refusal or cancellation notice provided is read before the appointment for the same reason.

The consultation itself is conducted by an Australian legal practitioner. Fees for any further work are fixed for each phase and are set out in a costs agreement before the work starts.

A person who wants to know whether their situation is one the firm acts in can say so on the contact form before booking anything. More detail on how the firm works, and on the areas it acts in, is set out on the about page.