LEGAL RELATED ISSUES EFFECT EVERYONE

Joan´s college roommate was suing her in court for alleging trying to run her over with a car. Joan had no lawyer, but found one in the yellow pages. She paid the lawyer $1,000 to write two paragraphs on an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper instructing the roommate´s attorney to forward all future correspondence to him. In one week, the roommate dropped the suit.

Michele received four points for crossing a double yellow line. Rather than agonize over the points and insurance surcharges she was facing in the very near future, plus court time, she phoned her attorney and received advice on what she should do. Following the attorney´s advice, she went to court and got her four points reduced to two with a substantially reduced insurance surcharge.

For the fourth time this year, Jose called his boss at 9:30 AM to tell him that he could not come into work today because he had to be in court with his younger brother who was a minor. It seems that the younger brother, who was constantly in trouble, had no one else to be with him in court except Jose. Since Jose´s work was satisfactory, his boss cut him slack by allowing him to use his sick time.

Frank´s family room experienced a sewer backup from the town´s sewer system, destroying a very expensive carpet and incurring immediate expensive cleanup costs. Not sure of the legal implications, he sought legal advice from an attorney and was instructed to have a police report made of the incident and then report it to the town department of public works. Prior to any compensation paid to Frank, town officials asked him just one question, "did he fill out a police report"? A month later, the town compensated Frank for a good portion of his losses.

WHY THE NEED FOR INDIVIDUAL AND EMPLOYER SPONSORED LEGAL PLANS

As we can see, each of the above stories is different, but all have one thing in common, the need for legal advice and/or representation. Most individuals never concern themselves with the fact that, at any time, they could be faced with a legal situation and have no recourse! It´s one of those things we don´t think is important until something goes wrong. In actuality, the time one needs a lawyer is not the time to search for one.

In the past, everyone needed deep pockets to afford legal advice and assistance no matter who the attorney. In today´s world, there is access to a variety of economically priced legal plans that are affordable to almost everyone. Whether it´s a single person, family of five, police officer, commercial driver, small business owner, etc., all have access to legal help without having to be rich.

With today´s employees expected to do more with less, stress is at an all time high. To compound that stress is the need for people to handle personal and business legal related problems and still be productive at work. The problem here is that most of us do not have the luxury of calling a private attorney to handle these issues and relieve us of the stress, pressure and worrying side effects that occur when we have outstanding legal related issues.

Moreover, without access to quality low cost attorney assistance, middle wage income earners are normally faced with making a financial decision prior to seeking legal consultation/representation. In addition, once a decision has been made to seek an attorney for an initial consultation and the attorney´s hourly rate is made known, most will cringe at the thought of incurring major personal debt, choose to supercede the real commonsense need for an attorney and opt to make the situation worse by trying to handle it themselves (i.e., seek advice from other non-professionals, represent themselves in court, ignore the situation until it has become critical, etc.).

With no end in sight to the "having to deal with our personal legal related problems and continue handling our daily work syndrome", companies need to be aware that there is a remedy for this ongoing problem. Unfortunately, many companies still do not realize that when an employee is experiencing a legal related problem, it is their problem also.

IMPACT TO NON-PARTICIPATING EMPLOYERS

Claiming that an employer will experience their own set of problems as a result of not acknowledging their employees'' need for legal assistance in handling their legal related problems was confirmed by a group called, LSK Associates*.

LSK Associates surveyed both white and blue-collar work environments for reasons of why employees might be absent from the workplace at any one time. Their findings revealed that out of 11 employee-listed Time Work Lost Categories, five of them included legal and legal-related problem clusters including legal, consumer, family death, personal family, and financial problems.

Within the five categories with legal-related problem clusters, employees experienced legal-related issues ranging from car accidents and home purchase issues with contractors, to divorce and family member death situations, to car repossession and insurance cancellations, to bad debt, credit troubles, tax problems and personal bankruptcy.

The downside to distressed workers experiencing anxiety as a result of any of the later mentioned legal-related issues, is an increase in employer-hidden costs in areas including accidents, poor health, higher administrative payrolls and impaired team relationships. LSK statistics confirm that 48% of a company´s employees will experience some business or personal legal related issue during the year, and be away from his/her job at least 51 hours per year to solve them.

Furthermore, these types of legal-related issues that employees must spend time away from the job to resolve, end up costing employers thousands of dollars in terms of overtime, absenteeism, higher insurance and compensation premiums and claims, administrative costs, and lost production, with the employee:

• Subject to an absenteeism rate five times the average for their jobs

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• Having four times the use of medical benefits

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• Encountering twice the use of sick leave

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• Experiencing a substantial reduction in their productivity

Employers need to be cognizant of the relationship between an employee´s legal related problems and the loss of money associated with it on the job. Once the employer can comprehend how employee absenteeism costs them money in lost work hours, the sooner they will be able to acknowledge the potential solution. Basically, it is no different with a good employee who has experienced a medical or psychological setback. Most companies offer medical/dental/vision/prescription and a myriad of other related benefits solely for the purpose of assisting the employee in their time of need. Legal benefits serve the same underlying purpose.

* Based upon a yearlong study published by LSK Associates, 1985. The test group was 1,284 employees.

To learn more about the benefit and company cost for offering an economically priced legal plan through one of your Employee Assistance Programs as either a fringe or partial fringe benefit, or voluntary employee purchase program, please contact Gary LiBritz, an Independent Associate and Group Benefits Specialist with Pre-Paid Legal Services (PPL) of Northern New Jersey at 201-475-1311.

Mr. LiBritz will explain the program and assist you in the steps necessary for adopting a plan for your company.You may also e-mail your response to www.garylibritz@hotmail.com.