Staying Ahead of the Game: LegalShield at RIAD 2017
This year the International Association of Legal Expense Insurers (RIAD) celebrated 100 years of legal expense insurance at their annual Congress in early October at Ireland’s Ireland Clontarf Castle. Attending RIAD was more than 100 delegates from 18 countries, representing several companies. DAS was represented in number from several European DAS Countries, and AXA of France was in large attendance. Also attending was Euromex of Belgium, Coris Lex Services of Poland, Seguros Catalan Occidente of Spain, GIE Civis of France, Arc legal Assistance and many more. Leading the way was AmTrust Financial Services representing Ireland and England as sponsors of the event along with DAS Ireland.
This is my 3rd Congress that I have attended. Last year’s event was in Montreal where Len Fentoon of GLSA spoke. This year’s topic was Staying Ahead of the Game. Attending with me for the first time, was LegalShield’s CEO Jeff Bell. LegalShield has approximately 1.6 million families as members and over one-hundred and forty thousand business members in the United States and Canada. RIAD was thrilled to have LegalShield participate in this year’s Conference. CEO Jeff Bell spoke on the final panel of this Congress.
The final workshops were divided into three as follows:
- Does your Internal DNA allow change;
- Communication/ connection with customers is it good enough; and
- Insurers’ value proposition to customers- Do legal protection insurer offer what their customer want?
The discussion groups were designed to foster dialogue in three languages in order to provide the best communication between members. The proctors gathered results to present questions for the final panel discussions.
The final panel was the highlight of the event. Here, Jeff Bell was featured to discuss the LegalShield business approach. The other members on the panel were the proctors of the three discussion workshops. Each proctor presented the responses from the workshop discussion, and Jeff was featured in the cleanup spot. Of course, Europe is an ancient place, yet it seems to be progressive in some social areas. That said, based on my attendance at the discussion workshop, many of the members were still very reserved and conservative in their approach to the business issues presented in the workshops.
Jeff Bell went into great detail of the philosophy of LegalShield since he took the helm almost four years ago. Many of the companies at RIAD are stuck with the bureaucratic notion of resolving claims as an insurer instead of addressing the customer’s issues. Jeff presented an idea that was new to the European community – make certain that we are offering services that are relevant to the consumer. If the consumer doesn’t use or need our services, they will go elsewhere to solve their problems. Jeff presented the LegalShield mobile application that is used to communicate with a law firm; create documents; send over traffic tickets; start a will questionnaire; and other legal matters, all in a secured manner. LegalShield’s direct access model allows the member to communicate with an attorney in real time to address their concerns while they are taking place. There is even an emergency access phone number that is answered 24/7 by an attorney! There are no claim forms or call centers to deal with in LegalShield’s client-centric approach.
Also, LegalShield’s concept of encouraging utilization of the legal services and benefits was new for the European community. It seemed to be as novel as our Declaration of Independence back in 1776 from England. Jeff has often spoken about the LegalShield business model where the attorneys are measured on customer satisfaction and use of the provider firms is promoted. These provider attorneys are paid based on the number of members, not the legal matters and that makes certain that every member gets attention. The European attendees were blown away by this fresh concept to put the member first, and procedure or process second.
RIAD members were so impressed with Jeff’s presentation about LegalShield approach that they are planning a trip to the Elevate by LegalShield event in June for attorneys. It was a great experience for me to attend RIAD Ireland along with Jeff. Over the past four years I have learned so much from our RIAD friends and I think RIAD learned a lot from LegalShield. I will be at Elevate from June 28 to 30th in Ponte Vedre, Florida all attorneys are welcome to join us by registering here.