The Australian immigration lawyer, and founder of her own immigration law practice, on resilience, reform, and why empathy is the most underrated tool in migration law. An interview for LegalBridge Magazine.

The paperwork took ten years. When war broke out in her home country, Tanja Djokic was barely a year old, far too young to understand why her parents had started filling out forms that would not be resolved for another decade. By the time the family finally landed in Australia in 2001, she was eleven, old enough to understand exactly what had happened and what it had cost.

Most lawyers discover their specialty. Tanja Djokic lived hers first. The years her family spent inside an immigration process did not just shape her childhood, they set the course for everything that followed: a law degree chosen for a single purpose, more than fifteen years of practice, and eventually a firm of her own.

A Decade-Long Wait: The Migration Story Behind Tanja Djokic

Tanja's family began their migration journey out of necessity. "I was a migrant myself," she says simply. The process started when she was around one year old, as conflict broke out in Serbia, the country she is originally from. What followed was not a quick relocation but a ten-year wait. "Paperwork back in the days actually took over ten years, if you would believe it," she recalls.

When the family finally arrived in 2001, Tanja was eleven and acutely aware of the significance of the moment. She understood that the move meant something specific: a better life, and crucially, better opportunities for education and a career. That awareness never faded. It became the lens through which she would later view every client who walked through her door.

Why Tanja Djokic Chose Immigration Law From Day One

Many law students arrive at university with no fixed destination, sampling different areas before settling on one. Tanja was not one of them. "I actually studied it because I wanted to go into immigration law," she says. "So it was just a very natural pathway for me."

After finishing high school, she went straight into a law degree with that single goal in mind, then straight into practice. "It's been immigration law for me from day one," she says. More than fifteen years on, she has never strayed.

She built her early career across a range of settings: small, niche, highly specialised firms, then a stint at KPMG, one of the country's largest professional services firms, and then two more law firms where she did something telling. At both, she built up and led their immigration practices. Doing that twice taught her something. "It was after doing it clearly for two firms when I went, I might as well try and build my own."

Launching a Law Firm When Australia's Borders Were Closed

The timing, in hindsight, looks almost reckless. Tanja opened her own immigration practice in 2020, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia. Borders were shut. Migration was effectively on hold. The entire premise of her business had, temporarily, stopped moving.

"Some people said you're crazy for doing it," she remembers. "Other people said it's a brave move. And I like to think it was a combination of both." She went ahead anyway. "Even COVID couldn't stop it."

That decision has aged well. The practice is now approaching its sixth year and has grown steadily from one year to the next. For Tanja, the growth is inseparable from the fact that she genuinely loves the work. "When you're doing something you love, you don't even feel like you're working," she says, calling it a cliché and then proving it true anyway.

What It Really Takes to Run Your Own Immigration Practice

Ask Tanja for advice for anyone considering the same leap, and the first words are blunt encouragement. "Do it. Do it, and be brave, and be confident in your own abilities."

But she is quick to add that running a practice is not the romantic picture some imagine. "You wear a lot of hats," she says. "You're not just an immigration lawyer and advisor. You become the accountant and the marketer." On top of that sits the regulatory weight. In Australia, lawyers must complete continuing professional development every year, and firm owners carry extra obligations around education, reporting, and compliance.

Then there is the part that matters most to her, and it circles back to her own story. Immigration clients, she notes, often arrive expecting approval to be almost automatic. It rarely is. Many visa pathways, such as those requiring an expression of interest and an invitation, offer no guarantee at all. So she sets clear expectations, builds backup strategies, and communicates openly. Above all, she insists on empathy. "Immigration is especially one of those areas where you're dealing with really people's lives," she says. "They're either relocating for family reasons or for work reasons. And everyone has a different story."

Her own practice reflects that breadth. One side handles skilled migration, both independent and employer-sponsored. The other handles family migration, reuniting partners and parents separated across borders. "I have clients really across the world," she says. She is also admitted as a solicitor and barrister in New Zealand, though the sheer volume of Australian work now keeps her focused there.

Inside Australia's Shifting Immigration Landscape

Tanja spoke the morning after the Australian federal budget was handed down, which gave her a real-time read on where the system is heading. Her summary of the current direction is clear: the government is sharpening its focus on higher-skilled migration.

A Tighter Focus on Skilled Migration

The skilled occupation list has been revised, with a number of lower-skilled roles removed and priority shifted toward professions such as engineers and doctors. The intent is to fill genuine gaps in the Australian workforce. But Tanja is candid about the trade-off. The same change can hurt smaller businesses. In hospitality, for example, the removal of roles like cafe manager from sponsorship eligibility leaves some employers struggling to fill positions they cannot source locally.

Greater Flexibility for Sponsored Workers

One reform Tanja singles out as genuinely significant is increased worker flexibility. Until recently, a sponsored employee could work only for their sponsoring company, and leaving a job meant being unable to start a new one until a fresh sponsorship was approved, a process that could take months. Now, a skilled worker who leaves a role has around 180 days, roughly six months, to find a new employer, and can work in the interim. Alongside this, the government has intensified its crackdown on employer exploitation, targeting companies that underpay sponsored workers with penalties and sanctions.

Where Australia Needs Talent Most: The Healthcare Skills Gap

Asked where Australia's talent shortage is most acute, Tanja does not hesitate: healthcare. Australia is struggling the most to bring in enough nurses and doctors, she says, pointing to long hospital waiting times as the everyday symptom. The latest budget, she notes, even added new nursing specialisations to the system, from critical care onward, a signal that medical recruitment remains a national priority.

How AI Is Reshaping Immigration Law

Technology is changing the field on every side, Tanja says, for practitioners, for the government, and for migrants themselves.

The most striking shift sits inside the government's own systems. For accredited sponsors, large companies that have passed a rigorous approval process, certain lower-risk applications are now approved automatically. "That's not a person sitting behind and just approving it straight away," Tanja explains. She lodges applications for some corporate clients and simply receives an acknowledgement that the application has been received and approved, with verification handled by automated systems.

For migrants, the picture is more mixed. Tanja increasingly meets clients who arrive with legal advice already in hand, generated by AI. They tell her that AI has given them the legal advice. It is often generic, a blanket assurance that someone qualifies for a visa, and it is exactly the kind of guidance that still needs a human to confirm or correct. Her position is measured rather than fearful. AI has real potential to speed up processing and improve case management, but as she puts it, "you still need a human behind all the advice."

The Mistakes Migrants Make, and the Advice Tanja Djokic Gives

If there is one mistake Tanja sees again and again, it is leaving things to the last minute. "A lot of my clients leave things to the last minute," she says. They come to her and say their visa is expiring in a month, asking what they can do. Often, a month is nowhere near enough. A well-prepared application typically takes three to six months to assemble, and complex cases take longer still. An employer that has never sponsored anyone before, for instance, must first be approved as a sponsor, which can itself take months, sometimes only after advertising the role for at least four weeks.

The deeper misconception is that migrating is simple. "The law is actually quite complex, and the process is complex as well," Tanja says. She recalls a client overseas who asked how to secure citizenship straight away. She had to gently reset the timeline: first a temporary visa, then permanent residency, and only then, often five or more years down the track, citizenship.

That long horizon is also what she loves about the work. Immigration clients stay with their lawyer for years. "It's like a tree, and it's just so many branches," she says. Clients who gain permanent residency or citizenship often return to sponsor their own family members, and the relationship keeps growing.

Her advice for anyone planning to migrate to Australia comes down to two ideas. First, act early and stay updated, because visa rules change rapidly, and the skilled occupation list in particular can shift mid-case. Second, aim for what she calls a "decision ready" application: one where every required document is on file so the department can decide without delay. In a system where processing times are the perennial pain point, that discipline is often the difference between a smooth outcome and months of avoidable waiting.

The Lawyer Who Lived the System She Now Navigates

Tanja Djokic's career has a rare kind of symmetry. The eleven-year-old who arrived in Australia after a ten-year wait now spends her days guiding others through the same uncertainty, armed with both the legal expertise and the lived memory of what the process feels like from the inside.

That combination is her real edge. In an industry increasingly shaped by automation and instant answers, she remains convinced that the human part is the part that matters: the empathy, the honest expectation-setting, the strategy built around a real person's life. She waited a decade for her own chance. Now, every case she takes on is a way of making someone else's wait a little shorter, and a great deal less lonely.

This story was produced by LegalBridge Magazine, an initiative sharing the perspectives of leading immigration and global mobility experts.