1 American Prepaid Legal Services Institute, Prepaid Legal Services Regulation Reporter, ed. Edmund A. Peters (looseleaf, 4 vols., including Supplement No. 8, Oct. 1982) (Chicago: American Prepaid Legal Services Institute, 1981-). The word State was dropped from the original title with Supplement No. 7 (Aug. 1982), which for the first time introduced federal material. The tendency of looseleaf works to change in the course of being reviewed is a source of surprises and frustration for reviewers. This is particularly true where proximity of interests and working environments of reviewers and editors provides ample opportunity for continuous feedback. The reviewers revised their comments on the Regulation Reporter several times in response to new supplements, for the last time at the end of 1982 after receiving Supplement No. 8. Since then, there have been further supplements. They reflect the editor's and the publisher's sincere efforts to keep the work current but they do not give us reason to change our evaluation.Google Scholar

2 Roger D. Billings, Jr., Prepaid Legal Services (Rochester, N.Y.: Lawyers Co-operative Publishing Co.; San Francisco, Cal.: Bancroft-Whitney Co., 1981 & Supp. 1982).Google Scholar

3 National Resource Center for Consumers of Legal Services, Group Legal Service Plans: Organization, Operation, and Management, ed. William Bolger, Sandra DeMent, & Joanne F. Pozzo (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Law & Business, 1981).Google Scholar

4 Erhard Blankenburg, Legal Insurance, Litigant Decisions and the Rising Caseloads of Courts: A West German Study (Disputes Processing Research Program, Working Paper 1982–3) (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, 1982).Google Scholar

5 The comments are not meant as an introduction to the subject for uninitiated readers but rather as an update. The subject, admittedly, is complex. Those who need an introduction are referred to Werner Pfennigstorf & Spencer L. Kimball, eds., Legal Service Plans: Approaches to Regulation (Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1977). For a more recent summary of the regulatory issues, see Werner Pfennigstorf & Spencer L. Kimball, A Proposed Act to Regulate Legal Expense Insurance (Research Contributions of the American Bar Foundation, 1981, No. 2) (Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1981).Google Scholar

6 One example is the experience of the Insurance Company of North America, which in the early 1970s devoted considerable effort and resources to the promotion of group legal expense insurance programs. Although the company could rely on an established marketing organization with considerable experience in the marketing of other kinds of group insurance, its efforts did not produce a single contract. See Lee Morris, Moderator's Introduction to a panel discussion of the Insurance Company of North America's plan, in Transcript of Proceedings, 5th National Conference on Prepaid Legal Services, New-Orleans, May 8–10, 1975, at 41 (n.p.: American Bar Association, 1975). For accounts of other unsuccessful and successful marketing efforts, see the chapter on promotion in Group Legal Service Plans, supra note 3, at 27, esp. 34.Google Scholar

7 See Werner Pfennigstorf, The European Experience in Legal Expense Insurance, in Pfennigstorf & Kimball, Legal Service Plans, supra note 5, at 487, 507–18.Google Scholar

8 See Pfennigstorf & Kimball, Legal Service Plans, supra note 5, at 2.Google Scholar

9 Why we think that “true” legal expense insurance must appeal to the middle-class market should be reasonably clear from the discussion preceding this statement and from that following it. Group legal service plans, as noted above, must appeal primarily to the group leadership, which in turn decides, from its perspective, what the members need. The middle-class market does not lend itself well to group marketing; it follows that to be marketed successfully to individuals, the insurance coverage must be attractive to them. We distinguish between group legal service plans and “true” legal expense insurance because the former often pursue, in addition to the essential function of insurance (assumption of the risk of economic loss due to fortuitous events), other objectives, such as education about legal matters, assistance in the selection of a lawyer, or reduction of the cost of legal services. For an extensive discussion of these differences, see Pfennigstorf & Kimball, Legal Service Plans, supra note 5, at 10–27, and for a description of the European legal expense insurance market, which is oriented toward the middle class, see Pfennigstorf, supra note 7, at 501–7.Google Scholar

10 For the various devices used by European insurers to control the moral risk (that is, the probability that claims are caused by personal characteristics of the individual insured, rather than by outside accidental events), see Pfennigstorf, supra note 7, at 537–43, and for the volume of business, see id. at 504.Google Scholar

11 One of the problems of the work is that it has had two successive editors over its short life. After a period of anonymity, the present editor's name first appeared as editor with Supplements No. 7 & 8.Google Scholar

12 It should be noted that the American Prepaid Legal Services Institute, in addition to the Regulation Reporter, has published several smaller brochures dealing with various aspects of prepaid legal service plans. It also conducts conferences and workshops, and it has accumulated a huge collection of plan documents, contract forms, benefit schedules, and reports, copies of which it makes available to interested persons.Google Scholar

13 The appendix, however, includes two items relating to the cost of legal service programs, in addition to various contract forms, plan documents, and the 1977 Kimball & Pfennigstorf proposed model act.Google Scholar

14 NAACP v. Button, 371 U.S. 415 (1963).Google Scholar

15 In re Primus, 436 U.S. 412 (1978).Google Scholar

16 Jordan v. Group Health Ass'n, 107 F.2d 239 (D.C. Cir. 1939).Google Scholar

17 Cited in Jordan, 107 F.2d at 249; listed in id. at nn.35, 38.Google Scholar

18 Erhard Blankenburg & Jann Fiedler, Die Rechtsschutzversicherungen und der steigende Geschäftsanfall der Gerichte (Reform der Justizreform, Band 8) (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1981).Google Scholar

19 For other differences, see Pfennigstorf, supra note 7.Google Scholar

20 This information comes from the original German study: Blankenburg & Fiedler, supra note 18, at 48.Google Scholar