What a Legal Services Plan Is

Group Legal Services Plans

What a Legal Services Plan Is

The Model Rules give one arrangement special treatment: a prepaid or group legal service plan operated by an organization that the lawyer does not own or direct.¹ The rule's own wording shows what such a plan is. Three features stand out: an organization operates the plan, that organization enrolls members or sells subscriptions, and the plan covers legal services in particular matters, which is why the rule speaks of “a particular matter covered by the plan.”² The vocabulary (“prepaid,” “members,” “subscriptions,” “covered”) points toward an arrangement much like insurance: people join in advance, and the plan responds if a covered matter later arises.

The definition matters because a plan has to reach people, and the profession has long been wary of lawyers who seek clients. Before 1977, most states flatly prohibited solicitation and advertising by lawyers. The organized bar condemned lawyer advertising as crass and commercial, beneath the dignity of the profession, and likely to undermine respect for lawyers and for the judicial system.⁴ On the older view, a client should choose a lawyer on the lawyer's character and reputation, so promoting legal services like any other consumer product was inherently deceptive to the public.⁵

Advertising rules have loosened since then, but the ban on personal solicitation has not. It remains nearly absolute.⁶ Under Rule 7.3(a), a lawyer may not, with limited exceptions, solicit professional employment by in-person, live telephone, or real-time electronic contact when a significant motive is the lawyer's pecuniary gain.⁷ The bar reaches live telephone calls, meaning calls other than recorded messages, and “real-time electronic” communications.⁸

Rule 7.3(e) answers the problem a plan poses for that ban. “Notwithstanding the prohibitions in this Rule,” a lawyer may participate with a plan that uses live person-to-person contact to enroll members or sell subscriptions from persons not known to need legal services in a particular matter the plan covers.⁹ The exception therefore departs from the ban, and its conditions sit in the same sentence: who operates the plan, what kind of contact it uses, and what the prospect is known to need. The next section sets out the ban the exception departs from, and the sections after it take those conditions one at a time.