Prepaid Assistance Can Overcome Fears
“People are petrified to use lawyers,” says Nancie E. Poulos, the general manager of the Montgomery Ward Legal Service Plan, a prepaid program designed to provide affordable legal counsel to the public and encourage consumers to overcome their fears of lawyers. The plan, part of a growing trend that makes lawyers available to the middle class, was introduced to California Montgomery Ward customers earlier this year.
Only about 10% of the American public uses the nation’s 600,000 lawyers, according to one American Bar Assn. survey. But in the last 15 years, legal-service plans have become more widely available. At first developed by unions for their members and companies for their employees as part of their fringe benefit package, now these plans are available directly to consumers.
Similar Services
Most of the consumer legal-service plans offer similar services. For a monthly fee, you have unlimited telephone access to an attorney for informal advice. Included in the same fee, some plans allow you to confer in person with an attorney or have him review a short document, such as a contract. A few plans even throw in the preparation of a simple will without charge.
In addition, plan participants are given reduced rates for the preparation of legal documents, such as wills or trusts, litigation and other legal counsel. It’s like any other high-volume marketing device, almost a discount store for legal advice.
The plans are meant to help resolve a basic problem: Most people don’t know how to find or use lawyers. The public mistakenly assumes that you go to a lawyer only after you get into serious trouble.
“The plans enable middle-class individuals to practice preventive law in the same way wealthy individuals do, by using a lawyer to keep them out of trouble,” says William A. Bolger, executive director of the National Resource Center for Consumers of Legal Services, a nonprofit research organization in Washington.
And the plans encourage participants to use lawyers for problems that would ordinarily not be worth the expense of paying a lawyer. If a mail-order company won’t refund your money or a collection agency won’t stop harassing you, it wouldn’t be cost effective to pay an attorney $150 an hour to write a letter, but if you are a participant in a prepaid plan, you can usually have a letter written for free.
The letter may not solve the problem, but often it can be much more effective than your own irate phone call. And it’s well worth the fees, which are usually about $10 a month for most plans.
At first, it is sometimes difficult for plan participants to get accustomed to using lawyers.
“Research shows that people are reluctant to call a lawyer,” Montgomery Ward’s Poulos explains. She says her firm actively encourages--even “badgers”--plan participants to call their lawyers whenever they have a question.
Programs Should Work
Once consumers realize that lawyers can be a great source of valuable information, can help explain how to assert their legal rights and that they don’t have to pay a high hourly fee, the programs should work well.
Nationwide, there are now about 16 million people, including family members, who participate in legal-service plans, according to Bolger, and about 15 firms that operate or market plans in California, including Amway, Montgomery Ward, Jacoby & Meyers and Bank of America. He expects that number to double in the next few years.
The legal-service movement will get a big boost in January, he says, when the AFL-CIO begins sponsoring a plan available to all its members across the country. (You should be able to get details from your local union representative.)
Lawyers who participate in the plans usually only receive a small fee, or sometimes no fee at all, based on the number of people they service. They are usually not paid for each telephone consultation or document review. Instead, they hope to make their money by referral business that will be generated from these new customers. They expect that plan participants will turn to them for litigation or preparation of other legal documents.
Even though the lawyer is essentially giving away his advice to build his legal practice, that “doesn’t mean the advice will be bad or wrong,” Bolger notes. But if you are enrolled in a plan and find the legal advice inadequate, complain directly to the program administrator. The Montgomery Ward plan has a toll-free number to field complaints. Some plans offer free second legal opinions, and no plan wants lawyers who are not doing the job well.
For a list of the legal-service plans available in California, send your request along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope to National Resource Center for Consumers of Legal Services, 3254 Jones Court, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007.
Any neighborhood group or civic organization with 200 members or more can put together a legal-service plan or try to use its group buying power for free or reduced legal rates in return for referrals and publicity. For more information on how your organization can get involved, write to Bolger at the same address.
