Do you need an attorney? I didn’t, but I learned the hard way

Image Description: A gold statue of Lady Justice. She is blindfolded and holding scales in her right hand. In her left hand, she is holding the top of a sword. She is an allegorical personification of the moral force in judicial systems.

In the United States, it’s really common (and dare I say, expected?) to have an attorney when going through the immigration process. While I was going through a citizenship process and not an immigration process, I saw that an attorney was hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) about C-3 citizenship claims on Reddit. “Wow,” I thought, “they must be an expert!” I decided not even to wait for their AMA to happen and I booked a consultation. While I was trying to save as much money as I could because I was unemployed and getting ready for an international move, I thought that it would be worth the few hundred dollars to get expert advice. Right?

In that consultation, they asserted that immigration attorneys had been given special information to immigration attorneys that wasn’t available to the public. They confidently presented an INTENSE list of things that I needed to include with my application, including things that I had never heard about before (e.g., a resume and a description of my community service). Even though I had or was about to receive all the records that I believed that I needed, they said that I needed even more. They told me that I wouldn’t qualify for urgent processing, describing what sounded like the criteria for asylum claims.

But here’s the kicker: they told me that if my application wasn’t perfect, it would DOUBLE (or more) the processing time for my application for a citizenship certificate. They said that I wouldn’t hear anything from the IRCC for almost a year and, at that point, if they found anything with my application, it would be returned to me and I’d have to re-submit everything and wait another year.

The only thing that I could think was “HOLY CRAP!!” Although the fees were significant (over $9k CAD), I couldn’t imagine waiting two years. I couldn’t wait that long. Where would I go in the meantime? I really didn’t feel like I had any choice but to sign the representation agreement and pay the fees. After all, I was desperate. Moving to a different international country would surely cost more, especially if I wanted to move to Canada once I was approved and I didn’t think that there was any chance that I’d make it two more years in the US.

I signed the agreement. I forked over the payment. They gave me a schedule that seemed like it was going to take a really long time, but I trusted that they knew what they were talking about.

The work Got started. Or did it?

At this point, my anxiety was through the roof. My life became absolutely centered around getting everything done for the application submission. This is not an exaggeration; from the moment that I woke up to the moment that I collapsed into sleep from pure exhaustion, all I did was work and think about my application. I annoyed multiple states’ vital records offices to get my records as quickly as possible. I LIVED on websites like Ancestry and FamilySearch, manually searching massive digitized records to make sure that I didn’t miss something because it had been transcribed incorrectly. I contacted distant relatives asking for insights. I diligently created an updated resume (I spent all day creating the perfect design in Photoshop after researching Canadian resume norms), and wrote a heartfelt letter explaining my passion for serving the community along with concrete examples of my contributions. I recruited friends to be willing to serve as references for my character. I created everything that was supposed to be included in the application package, plus more. Finally, there were only two things left from the list the attorney had given me: 1) one more record that they had told me I HAD to have and 2) the completed CIT 0001 which they told me that they had to complete because it needed legal citations throughout and the complexity would be easy for me to mess up.

Wait that info wasn’t correct . . .

Only, the process that they gave me for the record didn’t exist. And the record itself was something that I already had from an archive and had sent to the attorney (and shown to them in a meeting!).

I learned about AORs and, at that point, how non-urgent cases received them in about a month or you’d receive the application back with a detailed explanation of what needed to be corrected. It wasn’t the full processing timeline. The risk of not submitting something correctly was more like 1-2 months, not an extra year!

I started learning more about urgent processing and realized that I qualified on multiple factors.

I started researching more about what should be included in the application package and realized that they had me creating an immigration-style dossier, far above what was required for a citizenship certificate. I had spent SO much time creating all kinds of stuff that just wasn’t necessary.

So I emailed the attorney and pointed out that they had everything that they had asked for and I wanted to know when the application itself would be finished. The only response was that they would get back to me. And then when I inquired again, the same response. Finally, I asked whether they’d be able to get the application done by the following week so that I could determine whether to go ahead and submit the application myself.

Silence.

And then, the attorney quit.

It took me two days of hard work to finish putting together the application package myself, because I researched EVERYTHING again to make sure that I did it correctly.

Was it a mistake for me to hire them?

I’d like to believe that this attorney wasn’t doing this with the intention of scamming a vulnerable person desperate to leave the US as quickly as possible for her safety. The story that I’m telling myself is that they were just overconfident and assumed that citizenship certificates had the same requirements as immigration processes, and when they actually opened the application, they realized what they had done and quit. But they were also paying people for reviews, so that doesn’t exactly scream ethical behavior.

Then I heard from other people that they had also received bad information from other immigration attorneys and felt scammed, whether they just paid for a consultation or retained them to complete their application. In fact, I haven’t heard of a single positive example where someone used an attorney to apply for a citizenship certificate and felt like it had been the right decision.

That doesn’t mean that those people don’t exist or that it’s never the right decision to obtain legal counsel or that there aren’t ethical attorneys working on citizenship certificates.

But for my situation, the answer is clear: I regret hiring an attorney and I’m just grateful I was able to get my money back from them, even if I can never get the time, effort, and other costs that I incurred because of them back.