The Legal Buddy’s starting point is to help you quickly

Topics

• Employment contract
• Labour law
• Legal assistance

The Legal Buddy is a legal service provided by YTK Worklife to help you with challenging issues related to working life. With the Legal Buddy Premium service, a lawyer negotiates directly with the employer. Most of our clients get the help they need immediately, so there are as few heavy legal cases as possible.

The Legal Buddy service has been particularly popular this spring. The reasons for this popularity have not been pleasant, though. Our members have had questions for lawyers about termination of employment or payroll irregularities.

At YTK Worklife, we have regrettably found that the rapidly increasing flood of questions has at times been difficult to manage, and we have had to extend our promised response times. This has been the price of developing our services. Things do not always go as well as we would like. However, we are constantly working to improve the situation.

The call centre is our main service

The Legal Buddy has been at the heart of the YTK Worklife since the association was founded. At the beginning of time, almost 20 years ago, the first benefit offered to members was legal expenses insurance. It provided members with compensation for any legal costs if an employment dispute ended up in court.

Ten years ago, legal expenses insurance was surpassed in popularity by a new telephone service. Members could call and ask for advice from lawyers with expertise in employment law. Over the years, the service has received hundreds of thousands of calls. This is by far our most important channel: last year alone we advised some 16 000 members.

In addition to the telephone service, we introduced the Sulo bot, which is quick to understand and help with labour law issues.

A lot of legal protection for 24 €

In 2021, we took a big step forward with the launch of the Legal Buddy Premium service. It has enabled us to offer a first-class service to our members. In practice, this means that after a telephone consultation, it is now possible to have a lawyer handle a dispute with your employer. The premium service is valuable for our members: no longer do they have to negotiate and work out an agreement with their employer on their own, they can now do it with an employment lawyer at the helm. The service is available after at least six months of YTK Worklife membership. The price of the whole service is still the same, 24 € per year.

We occasionally get criticism in social media – and sometimes even in the media – for not having sufficient legal expenses insurance. However, critics do not know the value of our Premium service from a member’s point of view. The overall aim of the services provided by the Legal Buddy is to settle disputes as quickly as possible by agreement. Going to court will not help a person with a problem to get it resolved effectively. Legal battles might help to give visibility to the case, but in the quest for visibility, it is easy to forget the person and his or her situation.

Agreement is the most efficient and fastest way to

Our premium service helps our members in almost every situation. In well over 70% of cases, our members have benefited from the service they have received and only a fraction of negotiations have failed. It is therefore clear that negotiation is always better and more effective than litigation. That is why we are happy to pay for the timely and effective legal advice our members receive from top experts.

Last year, around 1,400 of our members received help through our Premium service. The largest sums of money recovered for members in negotiations have been in the five and even six figures. I stress again: without lengthy and expensive litigation.

New benefits and member services

Last year, we started offering payroll advice from experts in the field. Now, our payroll super-specialists advise our members on issues such as holiday pay, salary level setting and more.

Last November, we launched a call-back channel to our OMA+ service. There, members can give their details in advance and submit a call request to a lawyer. This service is already used by thousands of people.

This is not the end of the story. This year we have taken a major new step. We are building our own employment law team alongside our skilled and unique network of partners. Our first lawyer has joined us – you will hear more about this soon.

Thank you to everyone who has given feedback and contacted the Legal Buddy over the years. Together we have built a more conciliatory and solution-seeking society in Finland!