The Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association is thrilled to introduce CILA Online (online.CILA.co) – CILA’s new online community and document library platform!
Access to CILA Online is included in CILA membership, and we will be sending out invitations to all new members to provide them with access to the platform.
CILA Online has a several exciting key features:
1) CILA Docs: A document library that allows for the categorization, storage, and easy retrieval of all of the helpful documents and resources that have been shared by members (a place for all of those informative ImmReps emails and useful ATIPs). In the future, the plan is for CILA Docs to also include practice resources like precedent letters and checklists that have been created collaboratively by our members.
CILA Docs as a platform depends on the contributions of our members, so please submit relevant documents that you come across. The practice of immigration law can be unnecessarily opaque, and with your help we hope that CILA Docs will provide members with easy access to documents that help to shed light on department policies and procedures.
2) Discussion Forum: CILA Online contains a fully featured discussion forum for people who wish to participate in discussions via an online forum – it allows to “upvote” questions and answers so that members can indicate whether a topic is of interest to them, or if a certain answer was particularly useful. We have heard that folks may feel hesitant or sheepish starting discussions on a general email listserv, and we hope our discussion forum will provide a useful option for you to communicate with your fellow members.
If you prefer to interact with CILA members using email and the Listserv – don’t worry, a summary of discussions occurring on the online forum will be emailed to you periodically.
3) Listserv Archive: CILA Online will also contain an easily searchable read-only archive of discussions that will continue to occur on the Listserv – so no more worrying about needing to save all of those Listserv emails on your own devices.
4) Practice Tools: We have created a processing time tracker for immigration lawyers to aggregate the processing times they are encountering. Having a more accurate sense of real-world processing times allows us all to serve our clients better, so we invite you to share your processing time experiences. The processing time data provided members has been aggregated and averaged – a sample of one of CILA processing time trackers (for work permit applications) can be found here – and links to our other processing time trackers will also be available on CILA Online.
We hope that CILA Online becomes a useful and collaborative platform for Canadian immigration lawyers and we look forward to your thoughts and ideas as you start to make use of it.