Rakhmad Sobirov

3Thank you, Pulat. Thank you for having me in this show. I'm pleased to be here. My name is Rakhmad Sobirov. I'm the managing lawyer at Sobirov Law. Sobirovs Law Firm. My firm was established in 2012, and we exclusively practice business immigration and investor immigration to Canada. So in a, in this, in a short sentence, we help entrepreneurs, business owners, and investors to relocate their business to Canada or to expand their businesses to Canada and come to Canada with their families to settle down. So that's what we do.

5Yeah.

7Yeah, our office actually was built as a residential house and then converted to commercial building. We rent this building. It's an intersection of Kipling and Bloor Street West, and the maple leaf tree that you see behind me is on our territory. However, it neighbors the church's lawn, so next to our office there's a big church And as usually in Toronto area, as you notice, churches are usually surrounded by trees. This is a very established neighborhood, and that's why we have so, so many big trees, and we love it. We are surrounded by greenery, and it helps us to— I want to look into the— through the window and see something green. So that's, that's my preference.

8Although this, this room is the smallest room in our building. I want to spend my time in this building, in this room specifically. Yeah.

10Oh, okay. Just an overview. I come originally from Uzbekistan, a country in Central Asia like yourself, and I moved to Canada almost 15 years ago. Before moving to Canada, I had a very, very enjoyable career in the sphere of public international law. So I spent some time at International Criminal Court in The Hague and OSCE Secretariat in Vienna. So So I did my master's in law and so on. I moved to Canada to realize that I have to reeducate myself. So I had two choices. One is to go through NCA process, what we call National Committee of Accreditation for Foreign Trained Lawyers, or I could do everything from scratch. So at that time I was young.

11And I made the correct choice to start from scratch, to go to law school in Canada as a, as a norm, as normal Canadians would do. At that time, I had my permanent residence. So I went to Ottawa Law, University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, did my JD there and got called to the bar. So I switched from public international law to more private international law. Let's say, because after, after my articling, I spent some time at Bombardier Aerospace, commercial aircraft. That's why you see my Bombardier collection here. I was doing a contract advisory role at Bombardier for almost 4 years in aviation and aerospace. Then I moved to London, England. I was hired by a law firm, very reputable law firm in, in the area of aviation and aerospace.

12Called Bird& Bird. So I spent almost a year there as an aviation and airspace law associate. Then finally, because of certain personal reasons and, and Brexit at that time, the Brexit issue, I decided to come back to Canada. So when I came back in 2016, the law firm that I'm now managing, Sobirovs Law Firm, was always maintained and developed by my spouse, by my wife, Firuza Jamalova, who's also a Canadian lawyer. At that time, we were just one lawyer, one assistant law firm. So since 2016, almost 4 years now, we have grown rapidly. We've changed our area. We focused on our niche area. So since 2016, my contribution and my team's contribution was to make our law firm more robust.

13And fit to the new environment that we are in. Let's call it digital environment, right? We were very much old school, more brick-and-mortar law firm. Then the transformation started in 2016, and COVID-19 situation— now we will discuss in more detail— wasn't necessarily a surprise for us. It was an event, it was an unfortunate development around the world, But we were more or less prepared because we, we did digitalization as much as we could since 2016. So, and now we are 3 lawyer and 3 staff member law firm, and we, we have our representative office in Chile, in Santiago. We do a lot of corporate immigration, business immigration between Canada and other free trade countries, let's say Chile being one of the good examples.

14Yeah, that's in a nutshell who I am. And I wouldn't consider myself an immigration lawyer. I rather introduce myself as a lawyer who manages immigration law firm because my background is more in the sphere of aviation, corporate commercial law. Yeah.

16Yeah, The Hague. Yeah.

18In The Hague—

20It was in 2005. So I was offered what they call law clerkship at the office of the prosecutor of the ICC.

22International Criminal Court. ICC is an institution, as you may know, established by the Rome Statute in 2001. It's a very novel institution that prosecutes very big crimes, I would say, genocide, crimes against humanity, and so on. So it has a very strict mandate and jurisdiction. And at that time, being very much fascinated by international humanitarian law, public international law, I applied for clerkship and I was offered a 6-month clerkship at the court. At that time, I was one of the first Uzbekistani citizens at the court. And I spent very— a lot of— I had very much Enjoyed the process of dealing with high-profile, politically charged crimes. And it was my, my contribution was about analyzing the legislature of member states and come up with the supporting arguments for the first ever ICC case against Thomas.

23It's called, it's called Lubanga case. So The very first case. I'm very happy to remember that I was involved in that case. And it was a lot of learning, lots of learning, lots of great people, especially Canadians. At that time, the president of the court was a Canadian. So it was fascinating. And I think it was, to my mind, it was the pinnacle of my public international law career at that time. Yeah,

25It's— I would say followed my, my graduate in law, the LLM degree.

27I speak— if I can count French, which is deteriorating And to be honest, I haven't been practicing French. I speak 7 languages. So I—

29Well, my native Uzbek is one, Russian, Turkish, of course English, Tajik, Persian, and French.

31It's the University of World Economy and Diplomacy.

33Yes.

35Yeah, it's a 5-year law faculty.

37I, I got full scholarship from the Soros Foundation and I went to study my LLM at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.

39In 2004. I graduated in 2004 from the LLM program. Yeah.

41It was a 1-year program.

43Exactly. Yes.

45After Hungary program, I applied to, to immigrate to Canada. So my immigration process started. Then I undertook another master's degree, but this time in political science. At the OSCE Academy in Kyrgyzstan and Vienna. So it was a joint, joint program between Austria and Kyrgyzstan. So I spent half of my time in Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan and half of my time at the OSCE Secretariat in Vienna. So how long did that take? I pivoted towards political science, I guess. Yeah.

47It's a 1-year program again. Also, also, yeah. And by the end of the program, I had 2 things in my hand. One is my Canadian permanent residence, the immigrant visa, and second is my clerkship at the ICC.

49Yeah, proceeded to the ICC because I still had one year to enter and land in Canada as a permanent resident. So I still had some time and I started my career, my work at the ICC. Then in the meantime, came, came to Canada for the first time, landed as immigrant, went back to Netherlands again to complete my clerkship. Yeah.

51No.

53Yeah, I, I had the— I would say I had a typical immigrant story, right? When you move to a new country, you, you start everything from scratch. So I started working in, in the fields that are not related to law, in IT and, you know, customer support area. And then in 2017, I believe, I got my first so-called law firm job in Canada. That would be at the IP law firm called Bereskin and Parr as a trademark assistant, trademark legal assistant. So I did a lot, many trademark registration across former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and Southeast Asia. So I was helping a trademark partner at Bereskin to, you know, to do that, that, that what I supposed to be doing.

54And that was a very good experience for me. That was before I decided to go to law school. Yeah.

56I decided to to go to law school in 2007. 2007. I'm sorry, I said 2017, but 2007 I got to Bereskin and Parr. In 2008, I started my law school

58In Ottawa, yes.

60of rigorous study. Well, first of all, it was LSAT torture. So at the same time, I was working full-time while reading LSATs. For getting ready for the LSATs. And then, yeah, after getting admitted to Ottawa, 3 years of torture, but enjoyable, I would say. I learned a lot because, for that, you know that my background was in civil law jurisdiction, right? Civil law is different. I came and I'm very happy now looking in retrospect I'm very happy that I started from scratch and learned common law. And I think I'm more fit for common law the way I think that the freedom of creativity that is offered by common law. That's, that's what I, what I enjoy very much.

62Yes.

64Yeah, yeah, exactly. And challenging what Parliament has already said, right? Parliament has— the legislature has adopted the law. You have that skill and all the resources as a lawyer to argue your own story, your own interpretation of law, I would say. Yeah,

66Yeah,

68My spouse is the founder. I'm the so-called co-founder, although it bears my last name. I give the full credit to my spouse because she, after, after her articling at Heenan Blakey, the infamous Heenan Blakey, she started the firm as a one lawyer, one assistant, and then she, she built the foundation of the firm. I'm Let's call that I'm the CEO of the firm because I manage, but she runs the show.

70Yes, of course. This, I hope this will be some lessons for those who are starting their career. What we did, Pulat, is when we first opened our doors to immigration, because we, we as ourselves as immigrants, we had done all the immigration process ourselves, and we understand as lawyers, we understand the Canadian legal system plus the immigration. Then we realized there is a huge need for immigrant, future immigrants, future Canadians to come to Canada and be guided by those who have already gone through. For example, what I'm trying to say is we have gone through immigration, and plus as a bonus, we know the immigration law. So we said, these are our assets, plus we speak the languages, why don't we do something related to immigration as a general area of practice?

71So we opened our doors and started to get clients in any area of immigration, be it student visas, tourist visas, humanitarian application, humanitarian compassion application, all the personal immigration and business immigration matters, right? So in, in a sense, within immigration law, we've been doing what we call door law, right? Whoever comes through our door would become our client as long as it relates to immigration. Then in 2016, when I returned from London, UK, I, we, we brainstorm, we do the brainstorming with my spouse every 6 months and, and, and tell, you know argue in a positive way. We argue with each other saying what we should be doing. And knowing all the personal immigration matters plus business immigration matters, we decided to focus only on business immigration and be best in it.

72Using our language skills, networking, and, and, you know, familiarity with business cultures around the world. So then since 2016, we focus on business immigration, and we realize, Pulat, is that when it comes to personal immigration, there is a dynamics of a person who is outside of Canada who is probably not happy with his own or her own situation in their home country. He wants to, or she wants to improve the situation. So there is a, there is a story of, how to say, hope and also change. They want to change from bad to good, right? From, from their home country to Canada. That story in personal immigration is with, has a lot of drama, has a lot of tensions, has a lot of hope and expectation.

73When they hire a lawyer for personal immigration matter, they expect almost a guarantee that this will work out. But there is no guarantee in immigration law, especially when it comes to government decision, embassy decision, that you cannot guarantee that. And that's the disappointment on the client side. There's a negativity associated with that. But let's compare to business immigration. In business immigration, the person is wealthy enough, he has good life back home, he has companies to manage, but now he wants to add a layer of positivity. There's also, you know, positive story behind it, but he wants to add a layer of positivity saying that I want to expand my business to North America. Canada being a welcoming country with respect to immigration and very close to US market.

74They can set up an office, a presence in Canada, and sell their goods and services to the United States. So it's about positive, positive, positive. Three on the three side. On the client side, on our side, we don't have that pressure of life difficulties, depression, and high expectations of personal immigration. Then we also have positive on the Canadian side. The clients that we bring, the business owners that we bring, they contribute financially and they contribute to create jobs in Canada. So it's what we call win-win-win scenario. We win, client wins, Canada wins. I'm not saying that in personal immigration there's a no win-win-win scenario. It's— there is win-win-win scenario in personal immigration, but it's, you know, it's covered with a lot of emotions, a lot of emotions.

75And, and that's why we said Why don't we focus on what we enjoy doing and helping businesses to grow and expand in Canada and create great opportunities for Canadians? So that's, that's the whole story why we pivoted towards business immigration.

77I see. Well, Firuza was the— he's the senior lawyer when it comes to immigration. She has done a lot of judicial review applications when we were practicing personal immigration law. When embassy refuses for unreasonable grounds the visa, we had to bring it to the court, right, to the federal court. And it's a long process. It's expensive and long. And Firuza did a lot of other personal immigration appeals in terms of, for example, refugee status, right. She did a lot of appeals on that. More than I would say in terms of different level, including federal plus the appeal on the Refugee Appeal Board, she probably did around more than 100 cases in just an appeal level, appellate level.

78Because on a very application level, when there is a, we did thousands of personal immigration applications, and now we are doing hundreds of business immigration applications. So there is a lot of back and forth. I wouldn't say on a court level, but on the governmental office, Immigration Canada level, embassy level, we do a lot of back and forth with the embassy when we think that our clients have been unreasonably denied visa or permit. So every day, every day, Firuza is— she's, she's been doing one yesterday with a With the coronavirus, there's a lot of uncertainty who can come to Canada or who cannot come to Canada. We have a client from Turkey who has work permit already before pandemic.

79He was in and out of country. He was just caught up with the travel restrictions when he went back home. Now he wanted to come back and we had to prepare a big, you know, return package for him. So he's on his way now. He's on an airplane at the moment, so he will be landing today. So that's it. That's, I would say, quite a lot of written advocacy there in terms of pursuing the client's best interest.

81Okay, top 5 countries. One is Turkey. We, because we are fluent in Turkish language, our team is the largest Turkish-speaking immigration— I think Turkish-speaking legal team in the country. We have 3 members, or no, 4 members who are fluent in Turkish, and we are very familiar with Turkish business environment too. So Number 1 is Turkey. Number 2 is Southeast Asia, Vietnam. I would say Vietnam being one of the priority countries. And Chile is growing because there's a lot of investment, Canadian investment in Chile, and there's a free trade agreement between Chile and Canada. There's a lot of business go back and forth, mostly towards, from Canada to Chile, but now we encourage Chilean Chilean businessmen to come to Canada too.

82So that's why we have our rep office in Santiago.

84When it comes to Chile, we we had our client from that country. We helped them successfully to relocate to Canada. And then we thought why Chileans are good target clients, right? Because first of all, they can come to Canada without any visa. It's our electronic ETA, and no need for Chileans to visit Canada. There's a lot of Canadian business doing business in Chile. There's a free trade agreement. And we said, yeah, let's nurture this. And we found a partner who, who has been doing immigration services there for foreigners who are coming to Chile. So she's been doing Chilean immigration practice. And then we partnered with them and we said, why don't we work together?

85So, and now it's a growing market on the Vietnamese side. We have Vietnamese workers, staff members who are fluent in Vietnamese. Vietnamese, and we serve them very well. And there's a lot of trade between Canada and Vietnam, and Vietnamese suppliers, they sell goods to Canadians a lot. And yeah, we want Vietnamese businessmen to come to Canada, and there's a huge interest. Canada is a great immigration brand around the world, so especially in Southeast Asia. Now with Turkey, because as you know, we speak Turkish, there is a growing economic relationship between Turkey and Canada. You may see, you may notice already at Costco, for example, there are Turkish figs, Turkish dried fruits, and everything organic comes from Turkey, and textile, consumer goods, and so on.

86So it's growing economy and They— Canada needs consumers, Turkish consumers. Turkish businesses need Canadian consumers. So we are taking just that little role in facilitating this trade, I would say.

88It affected— in— it affected, I wouldn't say I wouldn't say it's substantially in, in terms of logistics. For example, we had our clients' visas approved already, but the embassies closed. There was no one who to issue the visa, right, or to issue the permit. And travel restrictions— the people had visas and everything was ready. They were sitting on their luggage to fly to Canada, and Canada closed the border. So That kind of delay, I would say, affected in terms of delay rather than in terms of practice. I think there is huge interest in Canada now after COVID-19. I hope we will overcome this pandemic very soon and Canada will be a bright star again in terms of immigrants.

89We have seen more or less the government handled this crisis very well. They took care of the Canadians by, you know, subsidies, by emergency wages and help. Now they've seen— the foreigners have seen how Canada behaved during pandemic, during crisis. Those who were not decided whether to move to Canada or not before the pandemic now have decided for sure they want to move to Canada. So after pandemic, we are getting ready for that flow of potential immigrants to Canada. And I think all my colleagues who practice immigration law would agree with me that after the pandemic, once the doors, the borders are open again, people will rush into Canada. Look at what's happening at the US, on the, on the US side, the same, the same trend.

90I can see that trend. And pandemic affected us in terms of percentage, I would say 30% of our decrease in revenues, 30-40%, but we are recovering steadily. As the economy opens up, people are ready to come to Canada.

92Mm-hmm, yeah.

94I think it's pretty much futile on our side because the type of clients we serve are either the ones that were affected, either they already have their work permit, they came to Canada, initiated their business, and went back home when the pandemic hit. So they have a status in Canada, and there's— there's— you cannot argue that Canada is not not allowing them because there's only the logistical issue that there's no flight between those countries. As long as they can come through the US, which is also a challenge now, and at this point that, that is one type of clients. The other type is who have already issued visa but have yet to visit Canada to initiate their business.

95Those are more problematic because now we don't know when the— those people will be allowed logistically, when there will be a flight, or when the, when Canadian government will say yes, now these categories of people can come. Because there's a very strict list at the moment who can come, and especially when it comes to family members, right? The principal applicant may come, however, how about the, the family and kids?

97Yeah, dependents. Because the, the The goal of the businessmen to move to Canada was not only to do business, but also to give a better future for their families, for a secure, safe environment for the family. So that's, I would say, we try to manage the expectations of those clients. It's only a matter of time, hopefully, that things will improve and we will be welcoming them again. At the airport. Yeah, I hope so.

99Yeah,

101I enjoyed it very much.

103Thank you.

105And I hope you will give me the honors to interview you one day for our channel because there are many questions when it comes to litigation within Canada and litigation of foreign, you know, foreign clients from outside of Canada when they have commercial dispute. With the Canadian side. So I, I will be honored to interview you too.

107Thank you. All the best. Thanks.