PrePaid Legal boasts their “legal services plan.” The truth is that very few legal services are ever provided under the plan. If you have a criminal case, contrary to what you’ve been told, the plan is useless. You are told that you have something like 60 to 300 hours of “free” legal services.
The truth is that those hours are for trial only. All the legal maneuvering up until then? You get 2.5 hours. That’s next to nothing. You will need hours of services before the trial that you will pay dearly for.
Gotta love those PPD investors. The stock is up on the release of the report. Although for people who follow MLM, this company’s misrepresentations are nothing new. I remember first hearing about PPD back when Escala blew up (ah, the good old days …).
Wow. I have a friend who used to use and sell Prepaid legal. He really enjoyed its benefits and the security that it brought him. I don’t know if he ever new about it the 2.5 hour pretrial hour cap. Interesting in deed.
The interview with the lawyer is interesting in that he was behind a class action suite where he stood to make a large percentage of that 9 million dollars. Money is only bad when it’s the other guy who is making it.
As a PPL member I have received dozens of hours of FREE service from my provider attorney. My husband closed a partnership and opened another, attending multiple meetings with the lawyers and his out of pocket cost was a mere $600. 85% of the usage of our 1.6 million clients is in the area of our plan that is free with the membership including consultation, research, letters written on behalf of the client, contracts reviewed and wills done for the member and the member’s spouse. The lawyers have gone to court for me at no cost to me, they have saved me hundreds of dollars on real estate closings and they would, if it was necessary, answer an emergency call for me in the middle of the night. It is wonderful peace of mind and I am proud to say that I have not only used the service but have shared it with hundreds of others who have equally glowing remarks to make. Do I earn money for doing that work - yes! And as a former college professor I will proudly tell you that it would have taken 40 years working just as hard to earn what Pre-Paid Legal has paid me in 10 years. Not only does Mr. Stonecipher want to make access to the legal system affordable for every citizen, he also wants to give us all an opportunity to earn as much money as we are willing to work for.
It isn’t just class action lawyers who get to earn in the millions - we do as well. Get educated about the service before jumping to conclusions based on biased and very inadequate information. Find out why the former attorney general from the state of Mississippi as well as three other attorney generals, the former president of the American Bar Association, the current president of the US Chamber of Commerce, and many others believe that this is the ONLY way that Americans can truly have EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.
Lorna - I’ve done hours of research about PrePaid Legal, so I am very educated about the company and the bogus product they sell. Are you suggesting that because the attorney is part of a lawsuit, he is wrong? That because he is making a living providing legal services, his conclusions are flawed? I’ll suggest to you that rather, he has found a fraud, and has decided to pursue that fraud in his professional capacity. I, too, make a living off finding fraud. It’s called a career and a job, and the way of the world is that people like me get paid to provide their expertise.
I was an attorney for over 30 years before I retired to market Pre-Paid Legal plans. The reason I went to law school was so I could hang out my shingle and represent the person walking down the street. Even back then I realized the inequities of the legal system- the top 10% could afford a lawyer, the bottom 10% had access to legal aid or the public defender, but the 80% of us regular people had very limited access to the legal system without spending an arm and a leg.
I was very happy to find Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. because I felt that the prepaid legal plans it offered went a long way to easing the legal burden on the 80%. Of course, none of the plans are perfect just like medical plans or insurance plans do not cover everything. However, for what most of us in the 80% deal with on a daily basis as legal issues, the PPL plans are excellent.
Personally, when dealing with the Court representation portion of the plan, I am very careful to explain the difference between actual court time and pre-court time. That is why I always recommend the $25 plan because it includes 17.5 hours of pre-trial services (not 2.5 as you misstated- that is for the $16.00 plan). In my 30+ years of experience as an attorney, with the exception of major cases, a large portion of cases that end up in trial could have easily been settled within 17.5 hours of pre-trial time.
You mention that you get “very little services”. In reality, you get an incredible amount of services, but as I said, you do not get everything. No legal plan can provide you with full coverage and this is a “life events plan”, to cover the things that come up all the time in every day life, not one time events such as a DUI, or divorce, and the plans are not representated as covering such issues. (In fact, if you ever came to a business overview presentation, those services are always specifically mentioned as being excluded). But even if you need a lawyer for such things as a criminal charge or divorce, you get those services for a 25% discount. If you were going to pay for an attorney anyway, wouldn’t you rather pay 25% less than you would normally have to pay?
I love marketing the plans and have many happy customers. Although it is not my main focus, I do have a small team of people who work the business part-time, and everyone of them love what they are doing as well. But they and I recognize that this is a business and must be treated as such. I believe that it will take at least 5 years to have built a solid foundation where I will be living very comfortably from a combination of my commissions and team overrides.
Most of the people who complain about PPL are people who went into the business portion of it thinking they were going to make a million dollars in a short time and with very little work. By putting very little down, and very little into making the business work, no wonder they thought the product was bad and failed to look into the mirror at their own actions. I would hazard a guess that, if you interviewed the people providing the majority of the bad press about the business, that the time they spent in the business would be relatively limited.
Imagine if they, instead of paying $99.00 to get their own PPL business, had invested in a McDonald’s franchise at a million plus dollars. Do you think that they would have quit after a few months saying it doesn’t work? No, they would have been in there day after day, working their buns off for years to become successful. Building a business with PPL is no different. Just because it costs less to get in does not make the business any less worth while. I personally would rather offer someone affordable access to the law than a greasy hamburger any day!
It is interesting that Brad Piggot is an former Mississippi US Attorney and is one of the attorney’s bringing suit (as a private attorney) against PPL. On the other side, a strong support of PPL is Michael Moore, the former Mississippi Attorney General, also the person who won the largest jury verdict in the world against the tobacco company. Therefore, you are going to find supporters and detractors of any large business. I happen to like the fact that Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, is also a strong supporter of PPL along with the President of the US Chamber of Commerce and the former President of the American Bar Association. You would think that the President of the ABA would be able to smell a rat if PPL was as bad as you portray it.
I realize that this comment will not change your mind since you have spent “hours of research” and are therefore “educated about the company and the bogus product they sell”. Rather, I offer it as someone who has worked in the legal system for over 30 years, and been involved with PPL as a company for a couple of years and so know a bit about the company and the legal system.
Candace - Robert Kiyosaki is a joke. Seriously. You shouldn’t quote him as feather in the cap of PPL. But you left a law career for a pyramid scheme. That really tells me all I need to know. Happy recruiting!
Look people, I’ll sum it all up nicely for everyone: PPL is absolutely a scam and a company that preys on the desperate, weak-minded among us in order to recruit new “associates”. I don’t know what enrages me more, the nonsensical, ineffectual, worthless service they hawk or the sick, Jim Jones-like cultish methods they use to recruit suckers to plunk down their hard-earned cash to market something that most people will never buy. I hope and pray that more people will use their God-given common sense and open their eyes to this joke of a company and the con artists they employ to swindle working people’s hard-earned cash. Please people, do some research on this illegal pyramid scam and the mentally ill desperate fools who participate in it.
In California as in other states, PPL markets the expanded plan for $26. That plan includes 17.5 hours instead of the 2.5 hours of pre-trial hours in the standard plan.
Tracy Coenen is a forensic accountant and fraud examiner who investigates white collar crimes, including cases of financial statement fraud, embezzlement, tax fraud, and insurance fraud. She is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud and more than 100 articles on fraud featured in industry publications.
Tracy's Next Book
5 months and 2 days until my second book, Expert Fraud Investigation: A Step-By-Step Guide is published. Release date is February 9, 2009.
