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Are you thinking of getting on the pre-paid bandwagon? Choosing a particular enrolment method can be very important in determining the benefits, costs and conditions of coverage of your legal plan.

A voluntary enrolment refers to a membership of a legal plan where people “voluntarily” subscribe to a pre-paid legal service in response to a direct email offer, during an employer’s open enrolment period or during individual sales representations. In this arrangement, you pay the prepaid charge, get the standard discounts open to all other members of the plan and get the coverage as per the terms and conditions of the plan.

In a group plan, all members are automatically included in the plan because of their status as a group. For instance, many employees enjoy a 100% participation in legal plans sponsored by their employers. They do not have to pay any pre-paid charge or premium, as legal coverage in the work place is now regarded as an employee fringe-benefit. Some universities also provide legal coverage for their students, financing the plans from their general tuition fees.

Throughout the course of your legal problems, you will have to make some tough decisions – If you were involved in an accident then you have to choose between bringing criminal damages or press with a plaintiff case, if you have a small business and you were involved in a deal, then you have to decide whether to sign it or let it pass. There is no clear-cut answer in many of these dilemmas, and getting the right lawyer is crucial to you. We examine the perks of choosing a lawyer in a pre-paid legal plan as opposed to hiring your own lawyer, and some simple steps you can take to choose a good attorney.

The number one criterion has to do with a lawyer’s legal ability: someone who lays the law down for you, present you with options, explain the ramifications of each decision you make and give you recommendations on the best course of action. In this day and age of complicated legal matters, many lawyers are increasingly specialised and you stand to get better information from someone with a practice focus in a particular area of the law than a generalist who deals with a broad spectrum of legal issues. Building rapport is also very important: your relationship with your lawyer can make or break your case. You need a lawyer who gives you candid advice and council you can trust, someone with enough perspective to step back from an issue and look at it from all perspectives.

Client-lawyer relationships are very limited within a pre-paid legal plan. Because of “preventive” nature of most plans, your contact with your lawyer will be limited on many occasions. You seldom get to talk to your lawyer face-to-face – as most of the consultation is done over the phone – and even when you get to talk to them, it’s difficult to build rapport when your office consultations are limited to a dozen hours a year.

The good news, however, is you still have some options left. When you sign up for a legal plan, you get to choose your lawyer and there is a number of steps you can take to increase the likelihood of getting a good lawyer. First, you need to ask for referrals from previous clients. Ask around about good attorneys in the network. Once you get a few names, check their educational background, their qualifications and their professional track record with your state’s bar association. After you receive your referrals, don’t shy away from setting up interviews with attorneys in the network. Most don’t mind receiving enquiries about what they do and how able there are. |Ask tough questions: How long have they been in practice? How satisfied are their previous clients? How many legal problems of interest to you have they taken recently?

A properly developed group legal insurance plan can be the perfect complement to any employer’s work life initiative. Considering that many employees are nowadays increasingly swayed by benefit options when making career decisions, Legal insurance is a viable product for many employers.

However, there is no single fit for all group legal plan for all organizations. For a start, each organization has a distinct list of requirements when contracting for legal insurance. A requirement built on the premise of reduced administrative costs will require a different set of legal services than requirements built on enhancing a benefits package or protect against liability. Legal plans also vary in what they offer: the quality of their customer service, flexibility of plan design and finally the experience and professional track record of their panel of attorneys.

In order to minimize the risk of poor service and plummeting employer satisfaction, an employer should conduct both requirements analysis amongst its employee base to cover for their difference needs, and a due research to select the most appropriate legal plan to fit those requirements based on experience, integrity and track record.

Group legal plans in the workplace have experienced rapid growth recently because of their usefulness to both employer and employee alike.

For the employee, a group legal plan is a cheap way to get legal coverage in much the same way as other traditional benefits. For as little as $20 per month deducted from payroll, an employee is put in touch with an attorney who can draft his will, buy or refinance a home, adopt a child and plan an estate. Unlimited legal advice is offered at no cost to the employee.

The benefits for the employer include increased efficiency and productivity from their workforce, and reduced administration costs to handle personal matters. Another very attractive benefit is the very low cost involved in researching and implementing a group legal plan. In fact, such plans cost employers very little in terms of time and investment. Group plans are structured on a voluntary basis, paid for through payroll deductions from the workforce. Additionally, the carrier handles all the claims, redundant paperwork and customer service related to the plan.

It is not uncommon to see the terms “legal plans” and “pre-paid legal services” used interchangeably. While they share a lot of characteristics in common, there are a number of differences you should be aware of.

Both of these terms refer to an arrangement whereby you pay a fixed monthly or yearly fee in exchange for legal services. The idea behind them is to save consumers on high legal fees whilst offering a valuable service. That’s where the differences lie: what kind of service is offered and what is covered. What are you entitled to in both schemes?

Pre-paid services cover for specific legal services: free phone consultation and advice, drafting of simple wills and trusts, review of sample contracts and writing of letters on your behalf. Legal services not provided will get charged at regular attorney fees, but you may be eligible for discounts. Legal insurance, by contrast, works much like other insurance plans, like health or car insurance. Although specific legal services are offered at times, your insurance provider will typically offer a policy that covers for all legal services. The policy will pay on behalf of you, the policy holder, or reimburse all expenses, costs or fees that you pay for legal services up to the policy limit. For instance, your policy might reimburse any fees incurred in your court judgments or pay your bail money – a service not provided by most pre-paid legal plans. Your legal insurance is also pegged to other insurance policies you may already have. If you run into legal problems involving your other insurance, then your legal insurance policy will protect you against loss or liability. For instance, if you are involved in a car accident when your auto-insurance has already run out and you are subsequently sued for recovery of damages, you will be protected by a legal plan insurance. The other difference between the two schemes is related to your choice of attorney. In a pre-paid legal service, you get to choose from a restricted number of the attorneys in the network. By contrast, a legal insurance plan provides legal coverage regardless of attorney. You are free to set up interviews with any number of attorneys and choose the ones you think will provide the best service for your personal legal needs.

Finally, pre-paid legal plans are much more accessible to the general public. Legal plans are harder to come by as only a limited number of insurance companies offer such arrangements.

If you are a member of a pre-paid access plan and are not getting the legal services you think you need, then it is probably time to upgrade to a more comprehensive plan.

A comprehensive prepaid legal service plan is designed to cover for the majority of your legal service needs in a given year. Access services, such as legal advice and information by toll-free number and follow-up service, are provided at no cost to you. It’s in the realm of more complex legal matters that require more time and effort from your attorney, that the comprehensive plan is more beneficial than a basic, access plan. You can have your trust set up, instead of a simple will, and a more complicated business sale contract drawn up as opposed to a simple contract. Legal representation can equally be provided in court for some cases, such as child custody. Comprehensive prepaid plans are most suitable for people who need business advice, have family trusts or own real estates properties.

Considering a pre-paid legal plan? He’s a run-down of the services you’re most likely to get and also some legal documents you need to sign before you enrol.

Telephone and Office Consultation: You have unlimited telephone access to a panel of attorneys regarding any legal matter of interest to you. You can also make brief consultation visits to your lawyer for up to 30 minutes per day at no cost to you. The only condition placed on these two benefits is that you enquire about a different legal matter. This aspect of coverage provided by legal plans is one of the most beneficial because it promotes preventive law. Preventive law is very much like preventive medicine – it helps in anticipating potential problems and taking the appropriate legal steps so that unnecessary legal problems or risks are avoided. With a simple phone call to your lawyer you can avoid getting embroiled in a hellish legal situation, and you can even identify legal rights you don’t even know you had.

Follow-Up Service: The panel of lawyers will write letters and make phone calls on your behalf to adverse third parties. Such follow-up service may be all it takes to solve many of your legal problems.

Legal document review: Simple personal legal documents, such as your insurance policies, sales contracts and leases will be reviewed. Any questions of legal nature that you have about the documents will also get answered by your attorney.

Drafting of wills: A will is a written document that regulates how you want your property distributed after your death. Your attorney will draft your will according to your state’s laws so that it’s valid when you die. He will also advise you on any provisions you might want to consider, such as appointing a guardian and establishing a trust.

Discount on regular fees: Any additional services not covered in the written fee agreement will be at regular fees – either hourly or flat – with a discount between 20 to 30%. These services generally include family matters, such as divorce and the custody of children, and court representation, such as traffic tickets and lawsuits.

Some of the legal paperwork you need to read carefully, agree on and sign include the following:

Written fee agreement: This is an agreement that outlines what services are provided in the plan, how much it costs and the methods of payment.

Grievance procedure: This document details the procedures that will be taken by the provide to resolve any complaints about attorneys or disputes regarding service fees.

Pre-paid legal services can be a very attractive alternative to hiring a lawyer for many people. You should consider the importance and relative priority of these benefits in light of your own legal needs. So what are the benefits going pre-paid compared to conventional hire of lawyers?

Benefit Number 1: Cost-Effective

Pre-paid legal plans can take the sting out of hiring a lawyer. Lawyers’ fees are prohibitive for most people: you can run bills of thousands of dollars and this is simply out of reach of most working and middle-class families. With pre-paid plans, what you get charged is more in line with what you pay for your health or home insurance. Plans start as low as $9 per month and typically don’t exceed the $30 mark.

Benefit Number 2: Simplicity

There is a number of very complicated set of fees lawyers charge: contingency fees, flat fees, statutory fees and hourly rates. In the case of contingency and statutory fees, you have to get into the intricate details of how these fees are computed – say for a contingency fee how much is the lawyer’s commission? – and their regulatory nature – who regulates the statutory fee and how do I know if these fees are in line with regulatory guidelines?-. The other two types of fees can be equally as complex. Increasingly, attorneys choose to incorporate any overheads they incur, like secretarial expenses, parking charges and travel fees into their flat and hourly fees. They can also set a minimum number of billing units, like three tenths of an hour (18 minutes), irrespective of how long it takes them to deal with your problem. This is just a sample rundown of what might influence the various fees charged by lawyers, other factors and arrangements can apply too. Contrast this with the simplicity in which pre-paid legal services are priced and furnished. The process is simple and straightforward: you sign an agreement to pay a fixed monthly fee and that’s about it. If what you’re looking for is not covered, your plan provider will give you a prior notice of a different billing so that you know exactly how much you will be charged.

Benefit Number 4: Pre-emptive Law

Pre-paid plans offer unlimited phone consultation and advice. This aspect of the service can save you a lot of trouble, money and time in the future. Most legal problems you are likely to face in your day-to-day life can be solved if you take the necessary steps in line with the law. With the right advice and consultation with your lawyer, you can detect legal blunders before they occur and hence minimize the risk of litigation and protection.

Employers are on the hunt - researching benefit tools that are low-cost, easily administered and satisfy their employees’ needs. One such tool is pre-paid group insurance. We examine the benefits of having such a work-benefit option from an employer’s perspective. The first benefit employers expect from legal insurance plans is increased productivity and efficiency. Today’s employees are interested in a variety of benefits to balance their work with their life requirements. Given that most American household had an issue with law last year that might have led them to hire a lawyer, it’s only normal that a legal benefit would increase employees’ morale and efficiency.

Having legal benefit as part of a work-benefit package can help the company recruit and retain the best employees. In this age of work-benefit hysteria, many prospective employment candidates base their career choices on the set of benefit package provided by employers.

Cost containment is another benefit. With less time and resources to be used for personal matters, the company expects to make significant savings on administrative costs.

You may be covered when it comes to health, life, car or home insurance… but what about legal coverage?

The question is not if you’ll need a lawyer, but when: according to the American Bar Association (ABA) “Americans have come to view legal assistance as a necessity”. Yet, most Americans have not used a lawyer more than once due to the sky high attorney fees – anywhere from $100 to $1000 per hour – and the trepidation involved in the search for legal services.

Prepaid legal insurance might just be the answer you have been looking for. The concept is simple: for a fixed monthly subscription, you get telephone access to advice from a lawyer. You pay a fixed amount in advance each month to defray the cost of legal services furnished in the future. These services span various areas of the law, anywhere from reviews of simple legal documents and the writing of a simple will to more comprehensive coverage of trials, divorce, bankruptcy and real estate issues.

Pre-paid legal coverage is a very attractive proposition for people who don’t have the resources to retain a lawyer on a regular basis whenever they need assistance. You effectively have a network of attorneys you can use as retainer to seek preliminary advice about what the issues are and how the procedures work whenever legal matters arise. Services not covered by the plan are available to members for a discount on regular hourly rates or flat fees.

A hard fact, however, is that more than half of new subscribers drop out of a prepaid plan after their first year. One reason could be that many members do not require any legal assistance during their first year, so opt out. Another reason is the scope of services offered, which are very basic and limited in nature. Most plans have certain caps or maximums as far as benefits provided are concerned, and purport to offer discount on standard attorney fees instead. However, by virtue of simply calling around by yourself you could probably negotiate a lower rate. Another problem with pre-paid legal plans is the likelihood of getting assigned to a novice attorney. Because of cost considerations, many of the companies behind per-paid services assign trainee or inexperienced attorneys to handle phone consultation and drafting of simple legal documents. You are also less likely to build rapport and understanding, two of the most important attributes of choosing a good attorney, as over 90% of the work is done over the phone.