The L-1 visa is an employment-based visa that allows organizations to transfer their professional employees from overseas branches to those in the United States. It’s designed for individuals with managerial, executive, or specialized knowledge roles.

In the vast digital landscape, bloggers and content creators often rely on eye-catching visuals to enhance their blog posts. However, the improper use of images can lead to serious legal consequences. Oftentimes, years later, the rights holder (being Reuters or another major publication), may turn up with a letter or email, to request thousands of dollars under the US copyright act, for what may seem to be a harmless use of content.

The E-1 Treaty Trader Visa is designed for foreign nationals who wish to engage in substantial trade between the United States and their home country. If you’re considering doing business in the U.S., the E-1 visa could be a valuable option.

Creating a trust can reduce or even eliminate costs related to wealth transfer, such as probate fees, and gift and estate taxes. This benefit might be mitigated however by inadvertently shifting tax liabilities onto other aspects of the trust arrangement, such as the income tax liability of the trust’s beneficiaries and the tax liability of the trust itself.

This article summarises the various kinds of trusts and their respective assignment of tax liabilities to members of the trust, before briefly discussing trust tax margins in the US and other important considerations regarding tax liability going into their establishment and management.

As many of us absorb the horrific details of conflicts and human rights atrocities occurring globally, in Gaza and South Sudan to name just two, we instinctively wonder when we can expect an end to warfare. If warring states cannot reach a resolution, when and how can those well-known and apparently globally powerful peace-keeping institutions step in to end the violence?

This article explores the contradictions inherent in an apparently globally powerful codified international law system, particularly when it comes to its limitations in the face of significant reliance on international customary law. Is codified international law capable of meaningfully enforcing a global rule of law and if not, what new customs and norms between nations might emerge instead?

In September this year (2023), the European Council announced that it had settled on two central intellectual property agendas to pursue ahead of negotiations with the European Parliament on IP legislation. 

The new agendas would to enable key pieces of legislation governing IP law in the European Union to adapt to the fast-evolving digital era. In particular, the EU legislative body proposes to support industrial design creativity by increasing the reach of design protection and expanding EU IP law terminology to include design mediums emerging out of technological developments (such as 3D printing and metaverse creations).

Since announcing its intention to become a ‘leader in tech talent recruitment and attraction’, Canada has taken several steps to attract a more highly skilled tech workforce.

One of Canada’s most recent attempts has involved enabling a direct transition to a job-specific worker permit from its tourist visa. The amendment aims to entice tourists in Canada, many of whom the Canadian government knows to be highly skilled tech professionals on working holidays, to remain in the country and contribute to the Canadian tech sector via a relatively hassle-free visa status alteration. 

Several years after the pandemic lockdown, remote work remains accessible to many and more now than ever is granting opportunities to people to become digital nomads. Governments globally have responded by adjusting existing visa requirements or offering an entirely new category of visa entitlements to cater to working nomads looking to enjoy simultaneously the spoils of visiting foreign lands for extended periods.

Canada this year offered specialised workers on the American H-1B visa the option to transfer directly to a Canadian work permit with almost identical conditions. Announced mid-June in 2023 at the global tech conference Collision in Toronto, the work permit was so popular only a month later that it attracted sufficient interest in 2 days to fulfil the Canadian government’s planned yearly quota of 10,000 applications.

If you are a business owner looking to import goods into the US, you may have some concerns about the current US-China trade dispute which has provoked the US to burden many categories of Chinese products entering America with hefty tariffs.

If you have considered migrating permanently to Canada, you may be familiar with Canada’s Express Entry system , which aims to fast track immigration to the country for immigrants with professional or trade experience. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (‘the IRCC’) has now introduced language competency and occupational categories to which it will preference in some parts of its Express Entry processing – find out how these new categories affect Permanent Residency (‘PR’) candidacy in Canada, and how you can check your eligibility.

Worsening conflict and humanitarian crises in Sudan and Ukraine have displaced millions and made the availability of refugee processing and relocation an urgent matter for discussion and action. This blog aims to help summarise for asylum seekers as well as readers less affected by the crises the pathways and general availability of refugee status in Canada, the UK, and the US.

Trademarks are unique and arbitrary words, phrases images or sounds which identify goods and products and their source for consumers. However, not all phrases or marks used to brand products or services can be registered as trademarks with the USPTO. In particular, many marks may be rejected for lacking any distinctiveness or uniqueness.

For more than a century now, trademark laws have protected the distinctiveness of products and seller identities. A drastic change to those laws, however, seems to be on the way with what has been called the fourth “revolution” of consumer spending – where once products were mediated by the recommendations of a shop owner, before being offered to the customer themselves in groceries stores, and then online, consumer spending now takes places almost completely with reliance on search engines and through programmed bots, in short, via artificial intelligence.

Moving out of Covid-19, many may have expected more from the digital boom that appeared to be occurring with the emergence of seemingly fully decentralized web platforms (Web3) and 3D virtual world interfaces (the ‘metaverse’). An article recently published in the journal American Affairs posits an unexpected root cause of the stagnation: the professionalization/standardization of the US academic research system.

As the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela continues to bring millions of refugees into Central and North America, the US has taken the opportunity to announce new refugee intake initiatives. In general, the announcement reflects the US’s intention to overhaul, staff and expand its immigration intake effort with respect to legally processed refugees from Central America. The changes however may also lead to unforeseen consequences to existing migration processes for Central American migrants.

E-commerce is now a fixture of the business world, if not fast becoming its dominant form of trade. Online sales afford business owners whole new markets and previously unimaginable opportunities to handle with ease multiple enterprises simultaneously. A digital platform however does not remove the obligation of parties in the sale of goods to understand clearly the terms of sale and their rights as the seller and consumer.

Recent news about the end of FTX cryptocurrency has drawn attention to the risks involved in trading in cryptocurrency. In the case of FTX’s collapse in particular, cryptocurrency’s vulnerability to fraud, mere market speculation and liquidity issues have been writ large. This week we took a look at some of the major risks involved in Crypto investments.

As discussed in our previous post, we will continue to examine the acceptance rates for various economic visa and immigrant categories in the US this week. As we will discuss in this article, there is a trend towards a high percentage of temporary work visa approvals in the US, while the transition to permanent status is completed successfully for a lower proportion of applicants. This may reflect the difficulty of obtaining permanent residency status in the US for many workers and business people, though the US is still an inviting place for those who wish to temporarily work and do business there.

Borderless Counsel frequently assists clients with applications for permanent and temporary work visas in the United States. The brief report below aims to capture the recent rates of visa application approvals, and their distribution across continents and countries. We focus in particular on the worker visas most frequently sought after by our clients: the non-immigrant L1-A, L1-B and H-1B visas; and the immigrant/green card EB-1, EB-3, and EB-5 visas. All data was sourced from the U.S. Department of State’s Visa Statistics. In this post we will focus on the H-1 and L-1 Visa categories. In our upcoming post, we will outline visa statistics for the EB-1, EB-3 and EB-5 (green card/permanent residency) categories).

This article provides cursory advice to foreign and domestic applicants for Canadian visas on their options for continuing to seek a Canadian visa should their application be refused by immigration authorities. In particular, the blog aims to equip rejected visa applicants with a sense of the time, costs, and complexities of various appeals and re-application processes.

Trademark protection in international territories significantly increases the export potential of businesses and their competitiveness in international markets. Business owners seeking to expand should be aware that they can now benefit from a globalized trademark registration agreement that enables them to file for trademark protection in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously, and therefore with drastically reduced fees and administrative complications.

Trademark ownership can provide innumerable benefits to your brand and business. Like any application to institutions and state bodies, however, the process of applying for a mark can seem fraught with procedural peculiarities and technical challenges. Below we outline the basic steps of the Trademark filing process and highlight the key concepts that underpin the determination of mark applications.

Many individuals looking to do business in the US are not aware that the US allows nationals of over 130 countries in the world to live and do business in the US as “treaty traders”, under the E-1 visa category. This is because the US has entered into strategic navigation and commerce agreements with these countries which promote trade and business.

In a time of potential global recession and high inflation, many people’s finances may not be in the best place at the moment. Unfortunately, in these situations, debt collectors are at their busiest trying to recover as much as they can from debtors, while minimizing losses for their clients.

Canada recently made changes to its immigration system in the form of Bill C-19, which amends the country’s immigration act, among a variety of other laws. The bill will change how the government chooses candidates via its Express Entry system in particular.

The intricacies of tax law can be overwhelming for almost anyone. We will discuss and outline some of the basics you need to know about your tax obligations under the law if you are a UK citizen living abroad.

This week we take a look at international taxes for Canadians and US citizens living abroad! Learn more about how to navigate these tax filings if you are an expat in this week’s blog post!

In a major new development, the UK government as created a new Visa program specifically for applicants who have graduated from top universities outside the UK within the last five years. Applicants under this new plan are eligible regardless of where they were born, and are not required to have an offer of employment in the UK to apply. Instead, in an attempt to attract what the government is calling the “best and brightest,” applicants who have obtained a bachelor's or master's degree will be granted a two-year work Visa, or a three-year Visa if they have earned a PhD.