People ask me what makes one Social Security disability lawyer better than another. Maybe they’re a good listener, maybe they genuinely care about their clients. Those things matter, and I don’t want to brush them off. But when you ask me what really separates a good disability lawyer, my answer is different: how deep is their bag of tricks and strategies that can win a client’s case even half a percentage point more of the time. How many of those small edges do they have that could be the difference between winning and losing on your file.

Listening and caring are important, but the thing I try to focus on the most, is winning. It’s putting the meat on the table for my clients. So let me give you an actual example of what that looks like.

When doctors and the Social Security Administration talk about how your medical conditions affect you, they throw around words like mild, moderate, severe, and sometimes marked. Marked means a complete limitation. Severe is a major limitation. Moderate is somewhere in the middle, and mild means a small limitation in the affected area. Most disability lawyers go digging through a medical file looking for the severe limitations to build a case around. They tend to look right past anything labeled moderate.

Here’s the thing: a moderate limitation can win a case too, in the right situation. Say I’m reading a client’s file and I see they have moderate limitations in their ability to maintain attention and concentration. Vocational experts hold the opinion that you need to be able to maintain attention and concentration for at least two-hour periods to hold down a job. So during cross-examination, I’ll ask the vocational expert whether it’s correct that even moderate limitations would prevent a person from maintaining full-time competitive employment. Very frequently, not always, but very frequently they’ll say yes, that would preclude employment.

With that, I’ve taken a limitation that often gets overlooked, one the judge wasn’t anticipating having to feel any pressure over, and turned it into a reason to grant the case. And if we still get denied at the hearing, it becomes a strong issue on appeal. Even when it isn’t the issue that wins on its own, it’s one more thing to put in front of a judge alongside everything else going on in the file.

That’s really what good disability lawyering comes down to. You stack up enough issues on the close cases that the judge looks at the file and thinks, this is too much to fight, I’ll go ahead and pay this one. It’s about creating just enough pressure on the cases that could go either way that the decision tips your way.

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If you want to book a call with our team to discuss applying for disability, call us at 972-532-6375 or book a time using this link.