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.
