Founded in 2009, My Visa Source initially focused on business and investor immigration. Sunny S. Dhillon and Sonia Mann built the firm around a deliberately narrow premise: one practice area and a market of clients ready to enter Canada.
Eighteen months in, that market was gone.
The Canadian Immigrant Investor Program, one of the federal pathways the firm had built its early work around, entered a period of suspension and upheaval beginning in 2010. Intake closed. Qualification thresholds doubled. The pipeline of high-net-worth applicants that had anchored the practice dried up entirely, and the program would be terminated by the federal government in 2014. MyVisaSource was young, bootstrapped, and suddenly without its original premise.
“Some of the federal programs we relied on had shut down,” Dhillon recalled. “That’s when we really revisited the strategy.”
That revisitation produced something the founders had not originally set out to build: a digital-first, broadly accessible immigration law firm whose central purpose is making legal services available to people who had historically gone without them.
A Different Kind of Practice
The strategic shift did not happen purely out of necessity. For Sonia Mann, it was a values question as much as a business one.
Mann came to law through sociology. During her undergraduate years, she worked in an ethnic studies and population research lab. She is the child of immigrants, and through her academic and early professional experiences developed a strong understanding of the challenges people face when navigating the immigration system without support.
“I was going to law school myself, and I felt like if I needed a lawyer, I was calling people, getting told things I didn’t understand,” Mann said. “And I’m someone who’s educated. I wanted to make sure that other people, when they need legal services, it was accessible and cost-effective, and they really knew what they were getting themselves into.”
The problem she was describing is persistent and well-documented. Research from the Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centreidentifies cost of legal representation as the single most significant barrier new Canadians face in accessing the justice system. Approximately one-third of family-class immigrants and half of refugees arrive in Canada without proficiency in English or French. A language barrier stacked on top of an already difficult process.
MVS built its revised model around closing that gap. The goal was a digital-first platform offering cost-effective representation to the full range of people who needed immigration help: families, workers, students, and businesses, not only the high-net-worth investor. “Your source for everything immigration” became the firm’s operating principle.
Building the Infrastructure
A broad mandate requires systems that can hold it together.
Immigration law at volume is unforgiving. Files with tight deadlines, complex documentation requirements, language barriers, and high personal stakes do not forgive disorganization. What looks like a simple spousal sponsorship from the outside involves dozens of documents, regulatory compliance checkpoints, and ongoing client communication. Replace real follow-up with a checklist and things break.
MyVisaSource responded by building an operational infrastructure most boutique firms do not have. The firm runs a technology stack with multiple quality control layers and maintains an extensive precedent library that sets minimum standards for how every file type is handled. Early in the firm’s growth, they also restructured how lawyers work: where a single lawyer once handled everything across business, personal, temporary, and permanent immigration matters, the firm moved to a portfolio model, with lawyers specializing in a defined practice area and collaborating across teams for clients who need multiple services.
Legal team managers, who are practicing lawyers, hold weekly in-person meetings where performance data is published openly: file submissions, task completion rates, response times, and client service metrics. The format means a new lawyer can see exactly where they stand, something not always visible in more traditional law firm environments outside of billable hours.
“Other firms, when they try to do high volume, it’s really easy for that to just unravel when you’re not giving clients enough attention or there’s a possibility of missing a deadline,” Mann said. “Having that infrastructure in place is what makes sure clients feel like they’re being taken care of.”
What Digital-First Actually Means
Reaching clients digitally was a structural decision born of early constraints. The firm was small. It needed to serve people who could not easily walk into an office or pay downtown rates. Building a model that worked online meant building one that worked for a broader population.
Over time, that approach shaped the practice into something with a wider, more direct reach. My Visa Source now serves clients from more than 120 countries, with a presence in Toronto, Vancouver, and Scottsdale. The Canadian and U.S. practices operate under separate regulatory frameworks, but the firm’s lawyers collaborate on client matters to identify cross-border considerations from both jurisdictions. The strategic issues that fall between jurisdictions are the ones most firms miss.
“If you make a decision in the U.S., this is how it’s going to impact you inside of Canada,” Mann said. “Firms without counsel from both jurisdictions can’t advise clients that way.”
As cross-border workforce mobility has grown more complicated in recent years, that coordination has moved from a point of distinction to a necessity for corporate clients managing employees on both sides.
Fifteen Years On
The firm has served 110,000 individuals and businesses since its founding.
The founding story could have ended in 2010, when a federal program suspension left MVS without their core market. Instead, the disruption forced a question about who immigration law should actually serve. The answer Dhillon and Mann arrived at was broad. The person who picked up the phone without knowing what their options were deserved the same quality of legal representation as the investor navigating a high-stakes corporate matter.
“I truly wanted to help people in every aspect when it came to immigration for themselves,” Mann said. “I wanted them to be seen and heard when they’re getting those services.”
The intention forced into focus by that early disruption still defines the firm today.
My Visa Source closely monitors immigration policy developments in Canada and the United States.
