IN THIS GUIDE · L1A planning for a function manager whose role has no direct reports
Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
Define the function before defining the role
Start with the function itself: what it produces for the organization, why it is essential rather than useful, and how the business would be affected if it stopped. Write it as a business description, not as a job posting. Function management can qualify where the facts support it, but the showing depends on the function's place in the company. A vague area of responsibility described in adjectives will not carry the case, however senior the person is.
Show the manager’s senior level in relation to the function
Describe the function’s place in the business, then show the applicant’s senior-level responsibility for managing it. Relevant records may explain budgets, policy authority, reporting relationships and decisions affecting other teams. The requirement concerns the person’s role in the organisational hierarchy or in relation to the function; it is not a claim that the function itself holds seniority. Distinguish that authority from simply being an experienced person who performs important technical work.
Document discretion without inventing supervision
Record the decisions made without seeking approval, the thresholds within which the role commits money or resources, the standards it sets for others, and occasions when it redirected work performed elsewhere. Do not dress contractors, vendors or matrixed colleagues up as direct reports; an inaccurate chart invites exactly the questions you least want. Discretionary authority described honestly and evidenced in ordinary business records is stronger than a supervision claim that does not survive scrutiny.
Prepare for the questions this shape attracts
Assume the file will be read by someone who has seen weaker function-manager claims. Anticipate the obvious challenges: is this simply a skilled individual contributor, who performs the underlying work, and what would be lost if the position did not exist. Draft plain answers with supporting documents attached to each. Where the honest answer is uncomfortable, counsel needs to see it early, because the alternatives and their limits differ substantially.
Settle the corporate relationship before drafting anything about the function
A function-manager case invites so much attention to the individual that the corporate question is frequently left until last, which is the wrong order. The classification requires a qualifying relationship between the employer abroad and the U.S. entity, of one of the recognised kinds — parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate — and that relationship must be evidenced rather than described. Establishing it means tracing ownership and control upward through every intermediate holder until the position is unambiguous, including where control is exercised through arrangements other than shareholdings. Both entities also need to be doing business, in the sense of regular and continuing activity rather than merely existing as registered names, and the relationship has to persist for the duration rather than only at the moment of filing. Deal with this first for two reasons. It is answered from records that already exist, so it takes days rather than weeks. And an unqualifying relationship ends the enquiry regardless of how well the function argument is constructed, which makes it a wasteful thing to discover after the drafting has been paid for. Hypothetical example: a port equipment manufacturer's two companies are commonly owned through a family trust, and identifying who the trustees are, and what the trust instrument says about control, takes one afternoon and reshapes the following month's work.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.