Comment by eurticket | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eurticket | Hacker News Reader

[Sort of off topic] From what I've seen in my limited experience with the US court system is split a couple ways:

Having no money in a court room results in you:

- getting a public defender that is incredibly overworked and underpaid; which results in your case having the dice rolled on if they are able to spend the time to successfully represent you.

Having no experience in a court room results in you:

- pleading which could have possibly worse results than if you tried the case and played it out naturally. It's not always appropriate for the case, but sometimes a lot of people plead to simply return to work. There is also a lot of cops that linger around doing just this, making you plead by handing you forms saying you need to sign this. Any inexperience in traffic courts for example makes you think you need to sign this, resulting in the scenario above, possible points for a no violation type offense.

Having money but no experience in a court room results in you:

- retaining a lawyer on your own dime; the money adds up, and if they don't find a way to represent you in your situation quickly, you're going to pay for every adjournment the lawyer may need. If you're searching lawyers, be sure to ask if they have big workloads, because the ones that have a smaller, more manageable number of ongoing cases are going to be your best bet obviously.

The thing about too many ongoing cases is the current courts situation dealing with overworked public defenders and lawyers. Not having the time it takes to focus on each case or creating mistakes due to burnout & fatigue. After having even one negative experience with a public defender or lawyer like this, I could easily see people wanting to represent themselves or like in the articles case, they aren't even guaranteed to get one in a civil suit.

My last two employers have both offered Hyatt Legal group plans[1] as a voluntary benefit.

I signed up because it seemed like a potentially useful benefit and ~$9/paycheck was a tiny enough cost to impulse check that box without much thought.

It's turned out to be one of my favorite, most used company benefits. Both companies have carved out different services the plan covers, but in general it has covered every instance I've ever needed to leverage a lawyer for personal needs. And removes the impetus of having to find/vet/pay a lawyer for smaller work like reviewing and drafting legal documents that I otherwise would have done myself and hoped I covered everything well enough.

It gives you the benefit of the second scenario, without the unpredictable costs of retaining a lawyer directly. If your work offers it, I highly recommend getting it.

[1] https://www.legalplans.com/

Are there any conflicts of interest in this, e.g would they represent you in an employment dispute?

I'm not a lawyer, and there are a lot of little facets to these rules so I could be wrong.

This looks basically like a "legal costs insurance", so the company pays into a fund that then pays the lawyers. I assume the company has no control over the money once it is in the insurance fund. So long as the lawyer doesn't represent the company directly in other dealings then yes they should be able to represent you in an employment dispute.

If the company was just providing direct access to their in-house counsel then no, that'd be a conflict of interest.

Most legal plans offered, even through third parties, explicitly do not cover employee-employer disputes. This has been the case at both Microsoft and Amazon that I have seen.

That's just rude. I think so long as the funding is out of the company's control there's no ethical violations but again there's a lot of rules and I could be wrong.

In my experience, employment law is the one area the service cannot address as they have the conflict of interest with the employer that supplements the cost of the program.

There are, but they're accounted for and explicitly called out and noted as situations that aren't covered. I don't know if it generalizes to all of their plans (employers can customize them to an extent), but for the two companies I've had it through:

- The employer can't see individual usage. It's effectively structured as an insurance plan, and all they can see is aggregate utilization levels for the group plan as a whole.

- Engagements are covered by all of the same client-lawyer confidentiality you'd have if you retained the lawyer personally. There's no shenanigans that rope your employer into that circle of privilege.

- Any suit/legal issue involving your company (the plan sponsor) is automatically not a covered situation you can use them for. That way they avoid the conflict of interest.

- Business-related issues aren't covered. So, for example, your plan may include all of the legal aspects of (document/title review, presence during closing, etc) during buying a house. But only if the house is for personal use. Houses bought as an investment property rather than a residence to live in would be excluded. Same with stuff like freelancing contracts and whatnot.

I wish they covered more. My work has a plan like this, but it does not cover family law.

Your work negotiates which services are covered under their group plan.

My last company had a blanket "Not Covered" for all of the family law services. My current company's plan is a lot more liberal and expansive in covered services, and covers all of the family law services offered to some extent[1]. The only things in the family law section limited to just advisory coverage vs. representation are related to the messy world of divorce (divorce, custody, support orders, etc).

https://imgur.com/6elP3jL

You sometimes get a private attorney who is assigned to a small public defense case load. I don't know how voluntary that is on the part of the lawyers. It can be forced upon them as a duty of court officers. In theory it should distribute the work more equitably.

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