There's plenty of stress of all kinds to go around these days, from stress (overwork, poor interoffice relations such as with a manager or coworker); to health issues (terminal or chronic illness, medical emergencies) to money issues (loss of job, reduced retirement, ability to pay bills such as legal and medical expenses) and relationship issues (divorce, death, providing care for parents or children).
But, according to legal insurance provider ARAG, despite the fact that 47 percent of employees report that stress causes them performance issues at work, employers can step in and relieve a substantial cause of stress that can underlie any or all of these issues: legal insurance.
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A 2016 study commissioned by ARAG finds that three out of four Americans experience one or more legal situations a year; further, among those who experienced at least one legal issue in a year, 72 percent experienced more than one.
And the cost of those legal issues doesn't only come in the form of stress (and the ill health that usually follows on its heels) but also in a cost to employers.
The stress from legal issues is actually pretty pricey: 68 percent of employees surveyed spent time at work dealing with them, at an average of 18 hours per issue, with half of employees having to take off an average of four days away from the job to resolve them.
Spanning everything from eldercare to wills to divorce to disputes between neighbors, legal problems can come in many forms—and so can the stress they induce, with 71 percent of employees saying they don't know where to turn to resolve the issue; 69 percent get stressed over the amount of time it takes to put it to bed, while 68 percent are stressed over the options open to them, 67 percent are stressed over the cost and 61 percent are stressed just over finding an attorney.
Just considering cost, the study finds that 76 percent of those surveyed had no defined way to handle such an expense–and also underestimated the average cost of an attorney by nearly $150 an hour.
Legal insurance may not be able to do anything about the other stressors in an employee's life, but it can reduce those stressors associated with legal issues. According to Erin Barfels, ARAG's chief human resources officer, the optional benefit is growing in popularity with employers, with the company averaging a growth rate of 10 percent year over year for the past two years.
While the majority of employers offering it do so as a 100 percent employee-paid voluntary benefit, a "very small percentage" offer it as a voluntary employer-paid benefit.
And with three-to-one odds that an employee will experience a legal issue in a year—whether it be the need for a will or living will, health care power of attorney, divorce papers, the purchase of a home or perhaps even immigration or an adoption—employees appreciate it, with a participation rate, depending on demographic enrollment, of 7–10 percent the first year, increasing over time to 20 percent.
Depending on plan design, premiums will run employees $10–20 per month, and most issues are paid in full, or have ceilings set consistent with industry standards as far as how many hours in which an average situation can be resolved.
Among situations with ceilings are contested divorces, for instance, but Barfels says that there's so much stress in dealing with legal matters because of the cost that the goal is to get issues resolved so that people are not still dealing with it "on the back end."
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