IN THIS GUIDE · Building supportable duty and authority records in a family business where reporting has always been informal
Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
Write down the structure that already exists
Begin with an honest chart: who reports to whom, who signs what, and who decides when two people disagree. In many family businesses the working answer differs from the answer on paper, and both versions matter. Note where a founder still approves everything, where authority has genuinely moved, and where two relatives share a function. The goal is an accurate picture that documents can later support, not a tidy one drawn for the file. Draw the chart with two people in the room who would answer differently, and note where they disagree rather than resolving it on the spot. Those disagreements usually mark the places where authority genuinely moved but nothing recorded the move, and they are exactly the points the evidence gathering should target first.
Convert habits into records
Informal authority can still be evidenced. Bank signing mandates, purchasing limits, contracts signed, hiring decisions made and approvals sent by email all leave traces. Collect them and see which duties they already support. Where a genuine responsibility leaves no trace at all, consider putting the arrangement in writing going forward rather than describing it retrospectively as though it had always been documented. Counsel should advise on how contemporaneous and recent records are best presented. Sort the traces you find by how hard they would be to create after the fact, since that is broadly how they will be weighed. A bank mandate lodged years ago, a supplier agreement countersigned by a third party and a payroll record are strong for that reason; an internal memorandum written last month describing long-standing authority is not, whatever it says.
Show the relationship between the entities properly
Family groups accumulate structures: a holding company set up years ago, shares held by several relatives, an entity trading under another's name. The L requirements turn on a qualifying parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate relationship and on the qualifying organisation doing business, so the ownership and control position must be documented as it currently stands. Share registers, incorporation records and any transfers between relatives are the evidence. Verbal understandings between family members are not. Order the registry searches before anything else in the file, because a family group's actual ownership frequently differs from what its members believe, and the difference is discovered rather than remembered. Where shares have passed on death, on marriage or by informal agreement, obtain the instruments that recorded each transfer, and where no instrument exists, say so to counsel rather than describing the position as though it had been documented.
Check the assumptions the family has inherited
Long-running businesses carry received wisdom about who can work where and on what basis. Test it. L categories are not limited to citizens of any one country, and citizenship, residence and the route a person uses are separate questions needing individual answers. No category promises permanent residence or citizenship. Have each family member's own circumstances assessed by counsel rather than assuming that what applied to one relative applies equally to another. It is worth naming the specific assumptions that most often turn out to be wrong: that a relative's earlier route is available to the next person, that a shareholding establishes managerial capacity, and that the business's own sense of who is senior maps onto the category's definitions. Each is checkable, and checking all three at the outset costs an hour.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.