Using a legal plan for attorney costs?

liz4paws

I have a legal plan subscription through my work where I pay a premium every paycheck and it allows me access to a multitude of legal services. For those of you who aren't familiar, it's similar to health insurance where as long as I use a covered in-network attorney and am using them for covered service, it's paid for 100%. And I was excited to recently learn that the legal aspects of adoption are covered!

So I have a few questions for you all. We will be pursuing DIA at the start of 2014. I'm trying to get a feel for costs. How much do attorney fees usually range from? I'm trying to see how much this service will save me.

The hard part has been finding a local attorney who is in my network that I feel confident using since the network is limited. I found one who doesn't specialize in adoption, but when I inquired about it he stated he is very familiar and does adoption matters quite often. But that's about all I know about this particular one.

Are there ever scenarios where the attorney isn't local and the work is done remotely? The only reason I ask is because we were able to use an attorney remotely for all of our embryo adoption legal work and we never had to meet in person. I'm curious if this might be the case with DIA too and that would help me expand my horizons in finding an attorney in network.

And of course I want to make sure we aren't skimping on an attorney just to save the money, but at the same time I REALLY want to save money if it's an option. What kind of questions would you ask the attorney to ensure it's a good choice? We will be working with an adoption consultant, if that adds to the picture at all and ultimately would be working with an agency to get matched. But anything else you'd advise me on in a situation like this? Am I being naïve?

Thanks for answering my questions which are all over the place!

Dr.Loretta

 

 

Attorney fees will vary depending on the track you use. We used an agency, so we only had finalization fees with a lawyer. Ours were around $3500. It sounds like this might be how the lawyer will be involved in your adoption.

We only met with our attorney the day we finalized in court. Everything else was paperwork sent back and forth, or phone calls.

As far as questions to ask, I might see who's in your network, and ask the consultant and the agency if they've ever worked with any of those lawyers. Maybe you'll get lucky and someone in your network has experience with them.

We did the legal plan for a year, the year before we adopted. We used it to get our wills and living wills done. Even in a town chock full of lawyers (we were in the county seat), we had limited options. And we didn't like our lawyer. When we updated our will after we adopted DD, we found a lawyer in town who was amazing (but of course not in our network). We had already dropped the legal plan because it was more or less a waste of money to us. Just a cautionary tale.

liz4paws

Thanks for the advice!