LegalShield

LegalShield

LegalShield Logo
Predecessor	Sportsman's Motor Club Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc.
Founded	1972
Founder	Harland Stonecipher
Headquarters	Ada, Oklahoma, United States
Area served	United States, Canada
Key people	Jeff Bell (CEO)
Products	Pre-paid Attorney, Legal services
Services	Legal services, Identity theft restoration
Revenue	$461 million
Owner	MidOcean Partners
Number of employees	813
Website	http://www.legalshield.com/

LegalShield (previously known as Pre-Paid Legal) is an American corporation that sells legal service products through direct sales and multi-level marketing in the United States and Canada.

The company was founded August 8, 1972 as the Sportsman's Motor Club. In 1976 it was incorporated as Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc., and made its initial public offering in 1984.

Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. went from being traded on the New York Stock Exchange back to a private company in 2011 when it was acquired by MidOcean Partners for $650 million and subsequently changed its name to LegalShield.

LegalShield develops and markets pre-paid legal service plans through a network of more than 6,900 independent provider attorneys across the U.S. and Canada. The company also markets an identity theft monitoring and restoration services through its partnership with Kroll Inc.. The company's service plans are sold through its business-to-business channel (B-2-B), its employee benefits division, and also through its multi-level marketing division.

On July 11, 1969, former CEO and founder Harland C. Stonecipher of Ada, Oklahoma, was involved in a motor vehicle accident and was hospitalized. Although the other party was cited for fault, they filed a suit against him for the accident. He hired a lawyer to defend himself in court, but in doing so, depleted his life savings. After researching the industry of European legal expense plans, Stonecipher created Pre-Paid Legal's predecessor, the Sportsman’s Motor Club, on August 8, 1972. The club offered legal expense reimbursement to its members. Pre-Paid Legal began using "network marketing" (multi-level marketing or MLM) in 1983. Pre-Paid Legal went public on the NASDAQ National Market System in 1984. In 1997, Pre-Paid Legal bought the People's Network (TPN), a satellite television network dedicated to personal development. Two years later, the company moved to the and then on May 13, 1999, Pre-Paid Legal was listed on the .

In 2001, the Wyoming Attorney General issued a press release announcing "When we discovered that Pre-Paid was using prohibited income representations to promote their multilevel marketing program, we warned them that the representations were prohibited by Wyoming law". Pre-Paid paid $4,000 in lieu of civil penalties, reimbursed the state for $1,000 in costs, and refunded $2,000 to participants who claimed to have been misled. In July the same year, the company was forced by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to stop counting the commissions they paid out to sales associates as assets, instead of expenses, the same way other types of insurance companies do, though they did not release their updated, halved, 2000 earnings figures until February 2002.