Unlike the dental or health care plans most people are familiar with, a group legal plan must provide much more than just a list (directory) of attorneys sorted by geographic location and area of law if it is to help employees find the attorney best for their needs. Finding the right attorney is very important because the wrong attorney can actually hurt the employee's case. This damage further increases employee stress, which can add to an employer's health care spending. According to a Legal Access Plans study, 90% of employees are not satisfied with the attorney they selected from a list or directory to help them.
According to a survey by the American Bar Association, more than 70 percent of U.S. households had a need for a lawyer in the previous 12 months.
While employees can select a doctor or dentist from a directory because employees already know the options to look for, they do not know the many complex legal practice specialty, procedural, and jurisdictional issues needed to determine which lawyer is best for their case. Most employees, especially those who are have never had a legal issue before, do not even know these issues exist, and many do not know if they even have a case. Making an uninformed decision, and selecting an attorney incorrectly, can increase already high stress levels and increase the amount of time missed at work. This is especially likely when the only information they have is a directory list of provider contact information.
The same ABA report also found that most of those consumers “felt uncertain about how to tell a good lawyer from a bad one,”.
90% of employees do not use a “Free-Choice-from-Directory” if help in finding the right attorney is available. Instead, 91% want their Legal Service Company to help them select an attorney.
Result: In Only 9% is “Choice of attorney viewed as Good or Needed.”
In Only 8% is “Choice” used by employee when they have help in matching. Internal LegalEASE Study, 2007
92% of employees utilize the confidential and private
Personal Assistance Specialists [PAS] instead of using the
standard directory or “find-it-on-your-own attorney
directory
Also, simply having any attorney does not alleviate the stress employees suffer when legal problems arise. In fact, many attorneys are unsuitable and can actually increase the stress and emotional distress suffered by employees facing a legal problem because they fail to provide the personal attention and assistance that employees need to feel like a legal problem is being properly handled.
Frequently, employees waste significant work time due to reaching the “wrong attorney”, or “the attorney never called me back,” because of limited time and resources on the employee’s part. Additionally, many Plan Members face cultural, ethnic and communication challenges in approaching Network Providers for assistance and a “name on a list” may be both intimidating and unresponsive to their specific core-value needs.
IMPACT ON PLAN ROI
Many legal plans do not have this internal structural component in place to handle issues, expectations, and differences in the most efficient manner.
ROI Conclusion: All of this adds up to the fact that with Legal Access Plans, HR staff is not involved in explaining the legal plan or helping employees who have selected the wrong attorney. Those plans advocating choose your own attorney with no help on the front end can “eat up” HR staff on the back, by having employees unhappy with the legal plan when they are confronted with a legal problem.
Personal Assistance Specialists (PAS) Improve Service
Based on its many years of providing personalized legal plans, Legal Access has put into place a highly trained team known as Personal Assistance Specialists [PAS]. The PAS have one job, and that is to serve as a “listening tool” to understand each member’s personal preferences in attorney selection. This system was created to add a “personal touch” to alleviate the stress employees feel when they encounter legal problems. Each call for legal service is directed to the appropriate Personal Assistance Specialist (PAS). These specialists have access to our proprietary experience-driven assessment factors, with direct access to our powerful needs-assessment tools and extensive specific information about a given employee’s needs.
Each employee is assisted by a trained specialist who will remain their Personal Assistance Specialist [PAS] throughout their legal problem. Personal Assistance Specialists [PAS] are unique to LegalEASE and are the key to unsurpassed service satisfaction with our legal plans. Specialists can serve as a “personal guide” in evaluating and solving the legal problems of any employee. While only attorneys handle the legal problem directly, each PAS’s is there at every turn to facilitate all aspects of getting the employee to the right attorney for help, either telephone or in-office, and walk with them through the use of the service until the legal problem ends.
The most critical factor is that because of our intake structure and matching systems, we have a higher degree of client contact than other legal plans during the intake, referral and follow-up phases. As a result, we engage initially in a careful discussion of client needs in locating the right attorney. Once located, the Personal Assistance Specialists contact the Plan Member regularly, after each attorney touch point, to determine if the client is satisfied with the services rendered and to ensure that the Network Provider has met the client’s service expectations. Satisfaction with the services rendered, the type of attorney referred and the Network Attorney services is conducted at each contact.
Specially Trained to
