The American Bar Association published a report stating that 90% of Americans cannot afford to pick up the phone and talk to an attorney. This is the reality with regards to the accessibility of legal services in America. Chris Ward, Independent Associate of LegalShield Business Solutions, talks about how LegalShield can provide individuals, families, and business owners unlimited access to a network of law firms across North America. Chris also shares that people can access LegalShield for a low monthly fee as opposed to high hourly costs of legal services elsewhere. Learn more as Chris demystifies business legal services and shares how he got into LegalShield, what their ideal client would be to help, implementing strict customer service, and more.

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Demystifying Business Legal Services with Chris Ward and Co-Host Meranda Vieyra

This is Chris Ward with LegalShield Business Solutions. If you are looking for affordable access to quality legal representation and you don’t have any, this is for you.

Welcome to the show, Chris. I’m joined by my cohost, Meranda Vieyra from Denver Legal Marketing. What we’re going to do is talk to Chris Ward with LegalShield. He works in the Colorado and Wyoming areas. You’ve been with the company for quite some time.

Thank you. It’s an honor to be invited onto the show.

Tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve.

My name is Chris Ward with LegalShield. In a nutshell, LegalShield gives individuals, families and business owners unlimited access to a network of law firms all across North America. As opposed to worrying about high hourly cost, people have unlimited access for a low flat month-to-month fee. Because of that, we have over 1.7 million households over 100,000 businesses across North America protected now.

Backing up, how in the world did you get into LegalShield?

It was a chance encounter. My background was the US Army. I served proudly for eleven years. The true Hollywood story is that in my last year, I was applying for jobs here, there and everywhere. I lived in Monterey, California and I was forced into entrepreneurship. The only job I got called back on was they wanted me to check IDs at the local British pub for $11 an hour. I didn’t think that my resume was only worth $11 an hour. I decided to follow a childhood dream of mine, which was video production. I’m not doing big projects, but I recognize the fact that this was the birth of YouTube and that entertainment was going to change from half-hour shows loaded with commercials to brief fifteen to twenty-minute videos without commercials. That’s what I focused on.

Almost immediately, we resurrected a jazz record label. I saw an opportunity. There was an incredible catalog of albums that nobody had access to. I was always a fan of jazz. I played trumpet growing up through middle school and high school. I started the company. I collaborated with an architect that built a sound studio. He had no knowledge of sound engineering himself, but he was passionate about his area. We collaborated together and we hired an attorney. He charged us a $10,000 retainer. However, I was very naïve having never used an attorney before outside of the office to get my will done. I thought that $10,000 would last us years until I got our first invoice. As I got the invoice for a little over $1,500, I said, “This is in case of an emergency break glass.” I put the attorney on the wall and just started doing what a lot of business owners do. I started Google searching legal questions, downloading legal forms, writing contracts myself and praying to God that they never ended up on a judge’s desk. I’m absolved of any guilt, but now I’ve come to terms with that.

A salesman came into my office one day and talked to me and my partner. He said, “If I could show you a way to protect and grow your business, would you give me fifteen minutes of your time?” I was both interested in protecting and growing my business so we sat down and we looked at the LegalShield business solutions plan. I’m very analytical soe tried it out for a couple of months to see if it was worth it. I was sold on the fact that it wasn’t a contractual obligation if it didn’t work because I had never heard of it before. We tried it out and saved our company thousands of dollars in the very first couple of months. When I lost my company a few years later, I became one of their associates and started marketing into the other business owners because I saw the need for legal services all across the business community.

When you’re talking to a typical business owner, what’s the typical question that tips the scale for them to use your services? What do you typically hear?

It’s the price point. That’s always been the greatest challenge. It’s the number one reason people aren’t using attorneys. They’ve done surveys after surveys and they’ve determined that the majority of Americans would seek legal counsel if it were more affordable. Since the advent of social media, what you see is a lot of people will Google search legal questions. Back in the day when the chat rooms were popular, there used to be legal chat rooms. Now, with social media, I see it on Facebook and LinkedIn all the time, people are posting legal questions that pertain to their particular business and their particular state and getting answers from God knows who.

I think the need is tremendous and that’s part of what I see is my job is educating individuals, families and business owners on why it’s necessary to have access to attorneys. We see that the majority of Americans rely on healthcare benefits. We recognize the fact that people have to have access to affordable healthcare. It’s the top discussion on every political platform under the sun. You’re three times more likely to end up in court than you’re ever going to end up in a hospital and nobody is discussing the inaccessibility to the justice system.

When we’re looking at across the business community, how would you describe your ideal client?

The ideal clients are those that are still trying to navigate the legal waters. They’re either getting started in business or they’re entering into a new industry where they may not be familiar with all of the pitfalls of that particular industry. It’s good to be able to have access to business consultation and legal consultation to ask questions to be able to navigate those. It’s one of the things that I mistakenly did and it came back to bite me years later. In complete transparency, we had the jazz record label that I had resurrected. If you get a chance to resurrect a record label, I would recommend not doing that. I’m not trying to get business advice, but it was a bad move. I’ve seen friends that have done the same with other labels.

Business Legal Services: You’re three times more likely to end up in court than you’re ever going to end up in a hospital, yet nobody is discussing the inaccessibility to the justice system.

What had happened was that the previous owner of the record label had taken out a $2 million loan leveraging the company. That business owner took off. He took all the money and vanished fifteen years prior to me coming into the picture. Whenever we started to become popular, I tell people we were in the newspapers, the magazines and television, but it was all Monterey County. It wasn’t a Rolling Stone or anything like that. As we started to become popular, all of a sudden, we got a letter from a law firm one day saying, “We’re suing you for $2 million.” We lost everything in the course of about 72 hours. We got a cease and desist on any further marketing or selling of any of our albums or anything. We had to hand everything over. We tried to work out a deal with the bank and they weren’t having it. Those were questions that I didn’t think to ask going into it that came back and bit us later.

You have an interesting background from your military career. Maybe it would be interesting to talk a little bit about what you did in the military and how that transfers over into what you’re doing now.

I had mentioned my eleven years of military service. The first eight years, I worked in Reconnaissance. I was a cavalry scout and that brought me to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1997, a year and a half after the war was over. I missed the war but I was there for all the turmoil. The job of Reconnaissance was not fully necessary so we were working in more of a military police fashion. I had been returned under a different unit in 2002, which was when I started learning the language. I figured that if the army wanted me in Bosnia, I better start learning how to speak the local language. In 2003, I went to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey and learned the language. Out of completely sign on the scene, I was supposed to be sent down in Southern Yugoslavia, in Pristina. I went down there to be an interpreter where I got derailed in Germany and then I fell under new orders to work in a human intelligence collection asset out of Sarajevo called the Allied Military Intelligence Battalion. It’s now defused. I can talk about it freely.

I worked as a spy for NATO for a year. I was one of the only human intelligence collection assets that they had in South of Sarajevo. Everybody was still operating in the North and I was down in Mostar, down in Dubrovnik and Croatia and traveled all over the south. My human intelligence training and experience translated well into the business community. I was able to network effectively and create relationships. I was never an interrogator. I went to Fort Huachuca for interrogation. I did four months of interrogation school, but it was all open collection.

We have a common background. I was intel down there as well. I went to Huachuca and all that good stuff.

Chris, as you know, I’ve been in law for twenty years. This is a unique legal product. LegalShield truly is different. You said you serve 100,000 businesses nationwide. In Colorado, how does LegalShield service businesses different than other business attorneys or business law firms?

The one thing that we found with a business that I had discovered was the fact that there’s not one particular area of law that a business owner needs to talk to. If they have a real estate related question, they may need to talk to somebody who specializes in real estate or a tax attorney because attorneys have specialized. There are attorneys that advertise themselves as small business attorneys, but there are still areas of law that may fall outside of their wheelhouse. One of the benefits of being a LegalShield member is having access to a provider law firm where they can get questions on any area of law.

The price point is the number one reason people aren't using attorneys.

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We also have a network of attorneys outside of that so that everybody is able to have access. We have very strict customer service guidelines whereas if I call in within four business hours, I can get an answer to my legal question. If I need documents reviewed, I can get those done within three business days. If I need a collection letter written on my behalf, that is sent out in less than three days. That’s how we’re able to do that for business owners where a lot of independent attorneys serving their clients may not be able to provide that strict customer service.

The big flashing word to me here is accountability. That is something that LegalShield might offer that a standard law firm can’t. LegalShield is a concept. Other businesses have tried to do prepaid legal services, flat fee and unlimited. Why did this work? Why is this different?

The market for legal service plans is getting busier. We saw Robert Shapiro from LegalZoom stepped away from LegalZoom and started RightCounsel. He’s taken the concept. As a matter of fact, Robert Shapiro took the idea from our Founder, Mr. Harland Stonecipher to create LegalZoom. Now, he’s going off to create RightCounsel where I think is a great idea. It’s a complete subscription-based program for business owners. Whereas in the attorneys, as opposed to them being in a specific firm, they’re all the attorneys that work from home or independent practitioners. He’s trying to generate a large network of attorneys nationwide. The challenge is he’s 40 years behind us and doesn’t have the infrastructure in place to compete. There’s going to be more and more competition coming to this space as it becomes a more proven concept.

Although LegalShield was the pioneer of the legal service plan industry in the United States, our founder had taken the idea from a company called ARAG that had been around in Europe for about 80 to 90 years, who had primarily created a plan to help support automobile drivers. As a matter of fact, there are parts of Germany where you can’t get a license unless you also have a legal plan as well. It’s legal insurance. He took that concept and brought it here and founded our company in 1972. Since it’s expanded, we are the most robust legal plan that’s available on the market. Not wholly the cheapest, but we’re definitely the best.

In 2019, I see a rise in subscription-based services. The Netflix and the Blue Aprons for food delivery and that type of stuff. Are there any comparisons you can draw for a business owner to LegalShield like that? Does this operate like an insurance plan? Or does it operate more like a Netflix where it’s all available 24/7 no matter what I need and when I need it? Can you shed a little bit of light on how this subscription works?

There’s one thing that we’ve recognized. The way consumers are accessing products and services has been turned upside down. You can look at what companies like Amazon have done to the brick and mortar stores. Infinitely every year, 90% of holiday sales are done through Amazon and no longer through all the retail store, so they’re closing doors left and right. With Netflix, the creators of Netflix brought the concept of the subscription-based to Blockbuster and Blockbuster turned it down. There’s this cognitive dissonance surrounding the concept of how legal services are delivered. With the subscription base, the challenge with attorneys that have tried to adopt this themselves, and I’ve spoken with a lot of attorneys that have said, “I’m going to create a monthly fee that people can access.” They don’t have the bandwidth to be able to provide the services on a subscription basis.

You realize that all of your subscribers are not going to use you all in the same day. The challenge is if you’re only the one attorney, you’re challenged there where with LegalShield members, we have access to a network of over 7,000 attorneys nationwide. Unlike insurance where if I’m an insurance provider, let’s say this wasn’t legal insurance, you may get a list of names of attorneys that are a part of this plan. With LegalShield, every member gets one dedicated number, so they don’t have to worry about finding the attorney. They call their provider firm in their particular state of the province. The law firm is responsible for finding the proper attorney to address their legal situation.

Business Legal Services: With LegalShield, every member gets one dedicated number so they don’t have to worry about finding the attorney.

Even if I go on LegalZoom right now and I say, “I want to talk to an attorney in Colorado.” I can go to their website, click on “I want to talk to an attorney,” and choose Colorado. I’ve only got six attorneys that are on their website that I can speak with each specializing in a different area. Let’s say that the attorney that I click on is busy and can’t deal with my issue. There is nothing as a LegalZoom member that says, “I’m going to get any certain amount of legal support within a certain particular time frame.” We have very strict customer service guidelines. We’ve been ironing this out for 46 years. It’s not perfect whatsoever. There are things that we could even improve upon our plan, but for what’s available on the market, there’s no comparison.

I like the access idea of a component of what you’re sharing here. As a business owner, part of demystifying business legal services, in general, is not all business layers are the same. Not all handle employment, not all handle contracts. Can you describe a little bit more about once I’m a member of LegalShield, I have a number that I can call? Is there an app? It’s because I’m not familiar with this at all. As a typical small business owner in Colorado, how would I access this?

A lot of the successful businesses of the 21st have to have an app attached to it. I would even love to see independent attorneys have an app where people can access them to schedule appointments or schedule a call. With business owners, the major function of an attorney is just the consultation alone. I have a question that I need an answer too. If I’m calling an attorney for a question that I have that needs to be answered now and I don’t get a call back until the middle of next week, that boat may have a sailed by then. The access is an important part. LegalShield members can download the app. If you go into your Google Play or App Store, you can download the LegalShield app.

There are two functions in the app that are free. We have what we call Erin, the legal assistant. It’s the most popular legal questions that you can ask and it will give you boilerplate answers to these traditional legal questions, which at the end of it, it’s going to say, “You need LegalShield.” They also have a legal form. All your popular legal forms, whether you’re selling a car. If you’re borrowing money or loaning somebody money, if you’re having somebody watch your children, they have boilerplate contractual agreements that you can fill out through your mobile device and have other people sign in real time while you’re standing in front of them. Those are two functions. The rest of the premium features you have to have enrolled to become a member for. I do have an audience that doesn’t use that so I text them the...