The Minnesota Legal Defense Plan, Part II

As I mentioned in part I, something had to be done. We had several hundred members in this state that were depending on the Legal Defense Plan, and it was - quite honestly - not doing the job. The question was, how do we come up with something else? Gary Cayo and I had long discussions with our law firm at the time, and were starting to make progress.



Then, in 2003, I was attending a lodge operations seminar in Las Vegas, in conjunction with a Western States Coalition meeting. In that seminar, we received a very large three ring binder that had examples of all types of documents used by state lodges all over the country. What caught my eye was a contract between the Arizona State Lodge and their law firm. In essence, it was a legal defense plan that had all of the elements that we were looking for. I showed the document to Robert Fowler, who was a member of the firm at that time and our lead attorney. I handed him the document and simply asked, "can we do this?". He thumbed through it and had a light bulb go on over his head. He replied "yeah, I think so". A few weeks later, after a few back and forths and some hashing out, Rob presented us with the Minnesota Legal Defense plan. He had everything in it that we had asked, with two big additions - COMPLETE off duty coverage for members, and even criminal defense for spouses. People need to realize that this is totally unheard of. As far as I know, this is the first FOP legal plan to offer such coverage.



When I saw this, my first reaction was "OK, how much extra is this going to cost?". I fell over when he said "nothing". A plan was born.



Gary Cayo and I barnstormed the state to introduce this plan. 300 people signed up quickly. The big bonus was that, while this plan had vastly more coverage than the National Plan, it was cheaper. The State Board was very pleased, and we thought that we had achieved Nirvana. Little did we know that storm clouds were closing in - more in part III.