PRE PAID LEGAL SERVICES

PRE PAID LEGAL SERVICES no longer appears to be active as a direct sales company.

Pre-Paid Legal Services is still active, but under the LegalShield name. The old PrepaidLegal.com domain now redirects to LegalShield, and LegalShield’s own FAQ states that Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. began doing business as LegalShield on September 10, 2011.

Original Npros business profile for PRE PAID LEGAL SERVICES, preserved below for archival purposes:

Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. was founded by Harland Stonecipher and became one of the best-known service-based MLM/direct-selling companies in the United States. The company sold prepaid legal-service memberships that gave individuals, families, employees, and small businesses access to attorney services through contracted provider law firms. By the end of 2010, Pre-Paid Legal reported 1,473,237 total memberships, including more than 1.36 million closed-panel memberships, and had provider law-firm coverage across 49 states and four Canadian provinces.

Pre-Paid Legal operated through a multi-level marketing sales model built around independent sales associates. In its 2010 SEC filing, the company described multi-level marketing as its principal method of product distribution and reported 438,007 "vested" sales associates, although only 82,620 personally sold at least one membership during 2010 and 6,806 sold more than ten memberships.

Pre-Paid Legal is no longer active under its original public-company identity. On June 30, 2011, MidOcean Partners completed its acquisition of Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. for $66.50 per share, in a cash transaction valued at approximately $650 million, and the company's stock was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. The company then rebranded as LegalShield. In 2018, Stone Point Capital agreed to acquire a majority interest in LegalShield from MidOcean, with MidOcean retaining a minority stake.

LegalShield remains active as a subscription-based legal and identity-theft-protection company serving the United States and parts of Canada. Its current business includes direct-to-consumer memberships, employer/group benefit plans, and a network-marketing-style associate opportunity. Stone Point describes LegalShield as serving approximately 2 million active members through dedicated law firms and identity-theft monitoring partners, while LegalShield states that its provider network includes 36 provider law firms and 900+ provider lawyers.

LegalShield's current associate program still offers sales and team-based compensation. The company's income disclosure states that associates can earn commissions from selling LegalShield and IDShield memberships, commissions on team sales, renewal commissions, and certain bonuses. For 2023, LegalShield reported personal-sales commission ranges of 8.4% to 44.8%, team-sales commission ranges of 0.24% to 36.3%, renewal commissions of 10% to 20%, and average active-associate compensation of $2,647.89 before expenses, with a median of $118.43. It also reported that 31% of active associates earned no compensation in 2023, while 17% qualified for Performance Club bonuses.

Pre-Paid Legal's regulatory history includes extensive state-level regulation of its legal-service plans, which were treated differently across states as insurance, specialized legal-expense plans, legal-service products, or service plans. In its 2010 SEC filing, the company stated that 40% of its memberships were in jurisdictions that subjected the company or its subsidiaries to insurance or specialized legal-expense-plan regulation. The same filing stated that its multi-level marketing strategy was subject to federal, state, and Canadian provincial laws governing consumer protection, pyramid sales, business opportunities, lotteries, and multi-level marketing.

Pre-Paid Legal's legal/regulatory history also includes an SEC informal inquiry disclosed in its 2010 Form 10-K. The company reported receiving SEC Division of Enforcement subpoenas on October 5, 2009, April 13, 2010, and July 9, 2010, seeking documents concerning its treasury stock repurchase program, Affirmative Defense Response System program, other marketing practices, membership statistics, segment reporting, FTC contingency disclosure, provider-law-firm complaints, payment-card compliance, and other matters. The same filing also disclosed two shareholder class-action complaints filed in Oklahoma in February 2011 challenging the fairness of the MidOcean acquisition process and sale price.

Harland Stonecipher, Founder