Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
Test the continuous year against payroll
The transferee must have one continuous year of qualifying employment with the qualifying organization abroad within the three years immediately before the petition. A seasonal employer should therefore print the payroll register before anyone drafts a petition and look for layoffs, unpaid leaves and periods when the employee was paid as a contractor. A year that is continuous somewhere in the three-year window is fine even if a later gap exists, so the exercise is to find the qualifying twelve months and evidence them with records, rather than to assert continuity and hope the file is not examined. Reconcile payroll against human-resources records, bank deposits, and any contractor agreements. The point is not to produce more paper, but to identify the uninterrupted twelve-month span the petition will rely on and explain any later interruption accurately.
Show managerial capacity, not headcount alone
L-1A requires that the transferee will be employed primarily in a managerial or executive capacity. Supervising three supervisors who each direct their own staff supports a personnel-management case, and the evidence is the reporting structure with names, positions and the duties of the people supervised. What defeats the case is a role that mostly performs the work: a director who pours in the tasting room on weekends and writes the schedule on Monday is doing line work with a title. Describe the proportion of time spent directing others, hiring and firing, and setting operating policy for the site. A staffing chart should show decision authority as well as reporting lines. Include who hires, evaluates, disciplines, and directs daily production; otherwise a small team can look managerial on paper while the transferee remains the principal producer.
Evidence the relationship between the companies
There must be a qualifying relationship between the Canadian employer and the US entity as parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate, and both must be doing business, meaning the regular and systematic provision of goods or services rather than merely existing on paper. Provide the share register, the purchase agreement for the majority interest, and evidence that each business is actually trading: invoices, payroll, tax filings, licences. Where a family holding structure sits above both companies, chart the ownership so the relationship can be read without inference. Use corporate records that trace control from the same starting point to both entities, then pair them with current operating evidence. An unsigned chart or a dormant registration cannot establish the relationship or ongoing business activity by itself.
Plan the period and the transition
An L-1A transferee to an established US operation may be granted up to three years initially, with extensions to a maximum of seven years in that classification. The US site should be ready for a manager when the manager arrives: staff hired or identified, premises operating, and the duties described in the petition actually available. If the acquisition is recent and the US operation is still being built, consider whether the case is really a new-office petition, which carries a one-year approval and different evidence, rather than pressing an established-operation theory onto a business that has not started trading. Put the expected start date after the evidence calendar, not before it. The seven-year ceiling for L-1A also makes it sensible to document time already spent in relevant classifications before deciding how long the assignment is meant to last.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.