Word: prepaid
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Some 2 million American families, largely blue-collar or middle-income, are now enrolled in prepaid legal plans similar to the group insurance plans in medicine. A few plans offer a full range of services, including counsel for criminal offenses; most are limited to routine procedures?divorces, wills, house closings, landlord-tenant problems. While the plans have not grown as quickly as consumer advocates had expected, they are considered the likeliest means of giving the middle class legal protections now enjoyed by increasing numbers of the poor (through legal aid programs) and the rich (who can afford...
...insurance companies sell group legal insurance, some major companies have tested the legal market but are holding off waiting for larger public demand. Labor negotiators have begun to focus on legal plans as a fringe benefit. Such coverage, says Claude Lilly, director of an American Bar Association study of prepaid plans, may be "just as common ten to 15 years from now as prepaid medical is today...
Many lawyers may enjoy less prestige, less interesting work and only modestly robust pay scales in the future. Trends in specialization, prepaid group legal plans, storefront legal clinics and advertising may well make for greater competition, lower fees and more of a supermarket approach to the law. The days of the independent, prosperous general practitioner are numbered. For some time to come, however, the top half of the classes graduating from the best law schools (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, Michigan and Berkeley) are likely to do very well indeed. These are the young lawyers who will be asked...
...capable of substantial reform. Eighteen lawyers were disbarred or disciplined in the Watergate scandal, and D.C. Bar Disciplinary Counsel Fred Grabowsky now says: "Watergate may have been the best thing that ever happened to us." Prodded by Supreme Court decisions, the bar has belatedly begun backing group prepaid legal-service plans, Blue Shield-style arrangements that bring legal aid to middle-income citizens for a flat fee (the United Auto Workers, for instance, has installed such a system for its Chrysler workers). With some exceptions, bar groups have also pushed for expansion of Government legal-assistance programs for the poor...
Many experts believe, however, that the two big factors for change-competitive pricing and prepaid systems-will provide a momentum of their own. "There will be a lot more services provided, but many aspects of the profession will be downgraded," says one. "There will be legal clinics where one guy does nothing but handle divorces all day and the next one does nothing but complaints about faulty appliances...