An AI-native immigration business from the United States is opening an office in London, and it expects to arrive under the Immigration Advice Authority, not as a licensed law firm. Manifest Law, an alternative business structure licensed in Arizona and run on software from Manifest OS, announced on 3 November 2026 that Sophy King would lead its newly launched international business as president of international immigration. She told Legal Futures, in a report published on 4 November, that the UK operation would likely be regulated by the IAA, because it did not need to become an ABS here at present.
That is a change of route. Manifest raised $60m in the spring, and its founder Dan Mishin told Legal Futures then that demand from US clients and the established ABS regime made England and Wales an obvious place to expand. Work was under way, he said, to apply for an ABS licence. Six months on, the plan King describes points to the immigration regulator instead.
Why the choice of regulator matters to you
Immigration advice is not one of the six reserved legal activities listed in section 12 of the Legal Services Act 2007. It is regulated instead under section 84 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, which allows only a qualified person to provide immigration advice or immigration services. A person qualifies in one of three ways. The first is registration with the IAA, the body known until January 2025 as the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner. The second is authorisation from a designated qualifying regulator, which for England and Wales means the Law Society, the General Council of the Bar or the Institute of Legal Executives. The third is working under the supervision of someone in either group. The Scottish and Northern Irish professional bodies sit in a separate limb of the section that does not touch a London office. Solicitors therefore qualify through the Law Society, which regulates them through the SRA, and a business registered with the IAA qualifies without any licence from the SRA.
So a business registered with the IAA can offer AI-led immigration advice from London and employ solicitors to deliver it, with no SRA licence for the business itself, while the solicitors keep their own SRA regulation as individuals. King, who is not a qualified lawyer, said her focus in the UK is on employing lawyers and other immigration professionals, in teams rather than as individuals. She is interested, she said, in the idea that a business using AI properly keeps its teams small on purpose. Legal Futures reports that Manifest serves more than 500 corporate clients, and the company expects to open 40 offices within twelve months and to cover more than 100 countries through its own staff and network partners.
We set out how firms built this way price and deliver work in AI-native law firms and what they change. Manifest adds to that picture a practice area outside the reserved activities and a regulator other than the SRA.
What a small firm should do now
If your firm does immigration work, start with your sponsor clients. Manifest sells to multinational employers and the teams that manage their staff moves across borders, so if it reaches your practice it will be through the sponsor licence holders you act for rather than through individual applicants. List the clients who recruit from abroad every year and decide which of them would listen to a pitch for one platform and one team across several countries.
Then offer the planning work before somebody else does. King described the service she wants as telling a client in advance that it will need 20 work permits next year and how they will be obtained, rather than waiting for each request. Any firm with sponsor clients can sell that today as an annual review of a sponsor client's hiring plan, priced as a fixed fee, with AI doing the first pass on the client's data and a named lawyer signing off the advice.
Look at your prices against the model too. Legal Futures reported in the spring that lawyers on the Manifest platform charge fixed fees or work on outcome-based terms, and that the business openly revolts against hourly billing. The pressure that puts on an hourly rate is the subject of what clients now expect AI to do to your fees.
If your firm does no immigration work, the lesson is the regulatory one. Most of what a small firm sells sits outside the six reserved activities, with employment advice, commercial contracts and will drafting among it, and a business built around AI can sell that work from London without an SRA licence of its own. Go through your fee income by practice area and mark what is reserved. The rest is where a competitor like this arrives first, and it is the part to price and deliver as if one had already arrived.
Legal Futures reported the London plans on 4 November 2026 in AI-native US firm opening in London as part of global expansion, which is free to read.
If you want to test how your work and its pricing would stand against an AI-native competitor, talk it through with us.
