ArlenGroup Law Firm Practice Group

Law firms are different from most employers because of tax, cultural, income diversity and employment tenure factors. Because of this, law firms require expert guidance in benefit planning, analysis, purchasing and ongoing management. 

ArlenGroup understands law firms and has developed an industry leading practice supporting the health and welfare benefit needs of medium and large size law firms. Our experience working with some of the country’s leading law firms has allowed us to deliver analysis and solutions that take into account all of the following factors that are unique to law firms.

• Plan designs must address the unique tax implications of partnerships.
• The hierarchical nature of law firms requires efficient use of permissible discrimination within benefits plans.
• Law firms’ acute sensitivity to the decisions of industry peers requires real time access to emerging trends.
• Significant variations in employee compensation within staff level job classifications require creative solutions to employee contribution challenges.
• Partner tenure, income and investment acumen create opportunities for deployment of more sophisticated health, death and disability solutions.
• Insurance providers tend to shy away from law firms, narrowing the field of potential vendors and increasing the importance of developing long term partnerships. 
  

Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) represent an intriguing health insurance solution for partners of law firms. As many health plan sponsors take a "wait and see" approach to HSAs and HRAs for their general employee populations, the tax treatment applicable to K-1 earners makes them particularly good candidates for early adoption of HSAs. There are four primary reasons why law firm partners should be interested in HSA style health plans and why law firms should accelerate HSA assessment on behalf of partners:

1. Lower Premiums 
2. Tax Leveraging on Out-of-Pocket Costs
3. Tax Deferred and Tax Free Savings
4. Post Retirement Health Insurance Funding

ArlenGroup's Health Savings Account 10 Year Cost Analysis for Law Firm Partnerships provides the benefit and management team with a definitive means for evaluating the cost impact of HSAs. The is customized to reflect actual partner enrollment, premium rates and plan designs and delivers a tax-adjusted cost comparison of HSA style coverage to both traditional PPO and HMO style health insurance plans. The report illustrates results for a number of different utilization profiles and provides a projection of the aggregate impact across the partnership.

Defections of high quality staff, associates and lateral partners are always a threat to law firms. Staff and associates are particularly sensitive to and knowledgeable of the compensation practices of other law firms. Given the extraordinary cost of turnover for highly educated, trained and compensated positions, leading law firms are acutely sensitive to how their total compensation package both compares to the peers and how well it is understood by their employees and partners. The rising cost of health insurance and the share that employees are asked to pay is increasing the importance of law firms understanding how their total benefit offerings compare to their peers. 

ArlenGroup has been the leader in partnering with law firms to build and accumulate benchmarking data that allows law firms to quantify, not guess, how they compare to their designated peer group. ArlenGroup uses this information as a core component of the annual planning and decision making process for our law firm clients – leading them to better solutions based on the reality of what is occurring in the marketplace.

2004 Law Firm Salary Continuation Survey

2006 Law Firm Health Care Survey

2007 Law Firm Benefits Survey

 

Employee Contribution Modeling

Relative to their corporate counterparts, law firms have historically been more generous in funding the cost of employee health care coverage and less generous in funding the cost of dependent coverage. Health care premium increases over the last 5 years have boosted the cost of dependent coverage to the point that it is now unaffordable for many lower paid staff level employees. Firms that have historically stratified employee contributions by job classification are increasingly finding this strategy too restrictive as the “ability to pay” within this group is vastly different but the employee contributions are not. 

ArlenGroup has extensive experience in assisting employers in developing employee contribution strategies that are sensitive to the needs of the lower paid employees and the firms’ financial management goals. ArlenGroup has robust analytical tools and experience in helping firms to understand how income based employee contributions can be an equitable and easy to administer solution to this problem. 

Law Firm Focused Financial Analysis

Law firm benefit managers need to view and understand plan information in a different manner than most employers. Rather than two dimensional “employee” and “employer” cost splits, most law firms need to understand the distribution of costs in a three dimensional split that adds “partners” as its own cost evaluation category. ArlenGroup’ understands how data can be best presented to simplify the analysis of costs and facilitate decision making. 

Specialty Life and Disability Insurance Solutions

Law firm partners have special long term income protection and death benefit planning needs. Their combination of high income, high intellect and relatively long anticipated tenure make them good candidates for more sophisticated insurance products that are less applicable to general employee populations. These include both specialty life insurance solutions and the proper application of individual disability insurance as a supplement to group disability insurance.

ArlenGroup is expert in analyzing, communicating and implementing programs that make sense for partners of law firms. These solutions are particularly geared toward maximizing tax leverage and ensuring that partners understand and are comfortable with the level of coverage they have, or do not have for both life and disability insurance coverage.

Disability Insurance for Law Firm Partners White Paper

Personalized Disability Income Fact Sheet

 

Communications Geared for Law Firms

Communicating with employee benefit plan participants is a big challenge for law firms. Partners and associates are too busy to attend meetings or read communications. Add to this that the family’s insurance decision maker is often the spouse and you further complicate what is already a challenging task. 

ArlenGroup has helped law firms overcome these hurdles by leading communication initiatives that focus on getting information to or from plan participants in the manner that best works for the firms’ culture. In most instances this includes a heavy reliance on electronic and personalized communications. ArlenGroup facilitates these initiatives by driving both generic and personalized content and by targeted use of web-based surveys that help a firm to under stand employee and partner wishes and preferences.

Benefit Extranet

Benefits At Work E-newsletter Sample

Sample Long Term Care Survey

Sample Physician Preference Survey