I first became involved with Pre-Paid Legal services because of the growing threat of Identity Theft. I enrolled in Pre-Paid Legals Identity Theft Shield plan, and at the same time purchased a legal plan for both my family and my small business. While I'm very satisfied with knowing that my credit is constantly being monitored, and knowing that if it is compromised, I will have assistance getting it restored, I quickly learned from an unforseen event how powerfull the Paid Legal plans can be.
As any small business owner does, we were looking for ways to save money. My wife signed a contract with a merchant services company which was exptected to save us a few hundred dollars. After receiving the equipment, we quickly learned that the processing machine would not interface with our accounting software and POS system the way the company claimed. To make a long store short, we shipped the equipment back and to our suprise the company returned the processing equipment back to us, with a letter saying "sorry, but this is a non-cancelleable lease", (which was to be for 5 years, at a cost of about $7500). They said that if we didn't pay, they would send us to collections and sue us for the total amount. Aftere explaining our case to them, they offered us a buyout of $4500, which is still an unfair settlement. When I refused to pay the $4500, they said they would continue with the law suit.
We quickly decided to contact our Pre-Paid Legal law firm for advice. We learned that the contract was signed under "Fraud of Inducement" as the company misreprensted their product and service. The attorney instructed us on how to get the Attorney General from our state, and also the state of the other party involved. With a few days, the merchant service leasing company received a letters from my Attorney and two Attorney Generals requesting that they release us from the contract.
About one week later, we received a letter from the merchanct service leasing company that they were relieving us from all obligations associated with the lease. This process saved us a minimum of $4500. Without my Pre-Paid Legal membership I would not have been able to afford an attorney to assist me with this case. Normally I would have been strong armed by the much larger company and forced to pay the fee or face what would have been a financially devastating law suit for my small business. This savings has basically paid for legal membership for the next seven years!
Since then, I've used my membership for preparing my Last Will & Testament, called for legal advice for my family and business dozens of times, for Tax, Legal, and Financial advice, saving me an enormous unknown dollar amount.
