Are you looking for LegalShield reviews? We have investigated the company, read reviews, looked at the company website, and looked at other sources as well. 

This article will cover the most common questions that people have about LegalShield. We are also going to reach out to LegalShield so that they can comment on this article. Nobody has asked us to write this article, and no one has paid us.

We cover both the positive and negative sides of LegalShield.

What Is Legal Shield?

They are a multi-level marketing company based in Oklahoma, United States. To our knowledge, they are the only MLM company in the legal market.

They have been in business since the ’70s, and have over 500 employees.

The HQ is in Ada, Oklahoma which is a small town outside of Oklahoma City. 

Funny enough, the HQ is on a street called “Pre-Paid Way.” Obviously, LegalShield has a lot of power and influence in Ada, OK to be able to get a street named that. The company used to be called Pre Paid Legal instead of LegalShield.

Source: Google Maps

From the pictures from the Google listing, it’s obvious that a lot of money went into their HQ. It’s quite impressive.

As of 2021, the company only operates in Canada and the United States. The company’s first attempt to expand into the United Kingdom failed.

Slater & Gordon (S&G), a law firm in the UK was meant to handle the LegalShield work. But when COVID-19 hit, Slater & Gordon decided not to do the LegalShield deal.

It’s unclear why LegalShield couldn’t find another British law firm to work with. It’s possible that a lot of law firms do not want to work with LegalShield because they are an MLM.

Lawyers value their reputation and don’t want to get involved with PR hits. We will talk about the media issues LegalShield has had later on in the article.

Is LegalShield worth it?

While things didn’t work out in the UK, it’s going really well for the company in the United States. They have over 1.5 million active customers.

Since many people have signed up with the company, there must be something to it.

However, from watching videos that LegalShield put out on the internet, it doesn’t seem that there are many attorneys involved with the companies.

It seems a lot of the people talking about legal services have backgrounds in retail or sales. I haven’t heard many people say they went to law school.

The company mainly talks about LegalShield as something that people found, and it changed their life.

The common story is that someone was poor, working in a dead-end job, and then someone introduced them to the company. Now they are rich.

Photo: A LegalShield Advertisement

Disrupting The Legal Market

Legal services are mentioned from time to time but do not seem very important. Instead, the company is talked about as being disruptive to the current legal market. At no point does LegalShield say that you need to know anything about the law to sell their services?

We doubt many sales reps know about spousal support agreements or government family support programs.

We fully support disruption in the legal industry. It’s something that is truly important. But it’s unclear how LegalShield is disruptive.

As mentioned before, LegalShield farms work for law firms. In the UK that law firm was to be Slater & Gordon (S&G). In Ontario Canada, it’s Mills and Mills.

So at the end of the day, unlike companies like , the work is still done in a traditional way. It’s done by lawyers at traditional law firms.

They compare themselves to Uber and Netflix. And then talk about how Netflix destroyed Blockbuster.

LegalShield says they are working on a big issue, the broken legal system.

The broken legal system

They say the legal system is only broken for those who cannot afford legal fees at $300/hour. They said legal justice isn’t black or white, it’s green. 

You can get as much justice as you can afford. LegalShield says they give you access to an app. You can press a button to talk to a lawyer about an unlimited amount of legal issues.

You don’t have to pay the lawyer’s hourly rate.

We don’t understand how you can have unlimited access to a lawyer for $29.95/per month. It doesn’t make sense to us.

There’s no way you would be able to get ten hours of legal advice for $29.95. 

We get into the strict limits on legal advice in the fine print later.

Legalshield Reviews and Downloading The App

You can download the forms on the app as part of that package. That would be similar to LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer.

It also seems that you can use the app to send out letters. We can see this as being a valuable service for $29.95/month.

These types of legal letters normally cost around $150 for a law firm to do for you. So the app could save you money.

According to LegalShield, the app (or an attorney) will also review up to 15 pages for you. Again, we don’t see a lawyer spending hours reviewing a contract for $29.95/month. Maybe it’s a legal assistant or AI that does it.

And of course, LegalShield needs to make money too.

So how does Legal Shield make money?

We had a hard time finding the answer to this question on the internet. But we did come across the “Income Disclosure” on the LegalShield website.

We read through it and below are our notes.

The policy sounds like members who sign up for the $29.95/month are also given the opportunity to work in the MLM. It’s likely this is how many of the MLM associates are recruited. It’s also likely that this is a key income driver of the business.

It costs $99 to become an MLM consultant.

Source: Legal Shield

As you can see, it’s very unlikely that you will get rich working for LegalShield. It’s not likely to pull you out of poverty.

If you work for the company for 20+ years, you might be able to make $15,104/year. Starting off, you are likely to make around $1000/year.

You could probably earn more working at Mcdonald’s. Plus you be less likely to lose your friends and family from pushing an MLM on them.

Maybe if you have the ability to sign up people for group sales, and you want to make a bit of extra cash on the side, LegalShield might be good.

Maybe you can make an extra $1000-2000 a year. But forget about quitting your job to work for LegalShield.

From our own experience in Vancouver, most of the LegalShield workers are part of the Chinese community. Chinese people are more likely to buy from their friends. It’s part of the culture.

Legalshield competitors

Does LegalShield have any competitors? We couldn’t find any that we knew. Rocket Lawyer was mentioned a few times.

Some people were asking about the difference between LegalShield and LegalZoom.

The names are similar, but the businesses are completely different. LegalZoom sells templates online. We added a link earlier in the article that you can check out.

Below is our list of the best legal companies.

Best Free Advice: Asking questions on the Q+A on

Self-Service Documents: LegalZoom

Complex Needs: Your local law firm

Leaving reviews for lawyers: ClearWay Law

At the end of the day, getting legal advice from a is the most important thing.

Reviews from the Better Business Bureau

The main office has a 2.24-star rating based on 118 reviews. They have had 269 complaints in the past three years.

You can see a screenshot of some of the BBB complaints below.

Many of the BBB complaints are about a person signing up for the app, and then not being about to get a referral to an attorney in a timely manner. 

Other complaints are around people cancelling their accounts, but they claim their credit cards are still being charged.

Legalshield reviews scam allegations

At the end of the day, legal innovation is tough. It’s hard to for you.

We appreciate the hardest thing for LegalShield is probably to find quality law firms willing to work with them. A lot of attorneys are against changes in the legal market.

LegalShield works for some people, for some things. It can work well for businesses or people that own property.

The video above mentions that a lawyer will only give one hour of legal advice for each issue.

And only one letter or phone call will be made for the matter.

Legalshield reviews make it clear that many users are not aware of these limits.

We found the video below. They will talk about the scam allegations. It’s a bit negative, but it’s just the person’s opinion. 

The video also provides a history of the company.

LegalShield Reviews and Pricing

Anything extra is an hourly rate with a discount of 25%. So basically it seems that the one hour of legal advice is a loss leader.

The goal is to help the customer start the legal issue, and then get retained as the lawyer with the 25% discount.

Honestly, that’s still a pretty good deal. The problem is that many people sign up for LegalShield thinking the $29/month will cover everything.

No one ever reads the fine print.

We also point you to the video below. It talks about MLM in general and not LegalShield. But it’s interesting.

This fine print makes sense. There is no way that you could have spoken to an attorney for an unlimited amount of issues for around thirty dollars a month.

Another issue that was mentioned was that each time you contact LegalShield, it’s likely that you will get a different attorney.

There are no guarantees that you will speak to the same person each time. This is to be expected and isn’t a negative for LegalShield.

I’ve experienced this with the Bureau of Pension Advocates. It’s a group of lawyers that represent veterans when they need help.

The problem is that a legal dispute with the government can take years because the Bureau of Pension Advocates has many different lawyers working on cases.

So every time you have to re-explain your case to the lawyer. It can be very frustrating, and it takes forever.

Legalshield Reviews and MLMs In General

We wanted to end this article by talking about multi-level marketing in general. It’s definitely worth watching the John Oliver video above if you are thinking about joining an MLM.

As you can see in the video, there can be a lot of drama.

MLMs can even destroy friendships and families. But it’s also amazing to note that the industry does 36 billion dollars in sales each year (MLMs.)

It’s unclear if the focus of LegalShield is signing up new people as sales representatives, or signing people up for the LegalShield app.

There is a fine line between running a pyramid scheme (illegal) and running an MLM (legal.)

In MLM/pyramid schemes, you get money when you recruit someone, and they recruit people.

Even Chuck Norris has got involved as the spokesman of an MLM company. Chuck said they did a lot of due diligence before joining the company. We doubt that this happened.

Legalshield Reviews and Issues

LegalZoom had issues when its shareholders were unhappy. The Security Commission investigated them when the company refused to provide financial statements.

When the financials were released after a six-month wait, it showed that the company was doing less revenue than it used to do.

LegalShield now does around $20.5M in sales.

The company might have been publically traded once, but we couldn’t find its ticker symbol. Please contact us if you know.

Legal Shield started getting sued a lot around 2004. The action claimed that the company was a fraud. This lawsuit was dismissed.

Then about another twenty lawsuits happened. None of them made it to trial.

The company was forced to release information about how much sales agents actually made. You can see the “Income Disclosure” graph at the top of this article.

One lawsuit was successful, and a court awarded someone around $10M. It’s unclear if they ever got paid or not.

Then there was another lawsuit with 400 plaintiffs that ended in a settlement.

We hope you found this information helpful. We will update this article once we hear back from LegalShield.

If you have additional questions about LegalShield reviews, let us know.