There is a rule in Social Security disability that most claimants never hear about, even from lawyers who handle these cases every week. It is short, it is obscure, and for people age 55 and older it can be the difference between winning and losing a hearing. I rely on it constantly.

Before I explain the rule, you have to know the test it lives inside. For claimants 55 and older, the SSA works through three questions in order:

The first two questions get most of the attention. The cases I’m talking about are the ones that turn on the third question, the transferable-skills question. That’s where the rule lives.

Here is how the SSA tries to deny these cases. It looks at your past work and says: okay, you used to do this job that required standing and walking most of the day. Could you do a seated, desk version of that same job using the skills you already have? If the answer is yes, you lose.

That’s the move. And without the rule I’m about to explain, age-55-and-older claimants lose this argument all the time, even when their bodies clearly cannot keep doing the work they used to do.

For claimants 55 and older, the SSA can only deny you at this prong if the new job requires “very little, if any, vocational adjustment.”

Those six words, very little, if any, vocational adjustment, are the whole game. The SSA cannot just point to a sedentary desk job that uses your skills and call it a day. It has to be a job you could essentially walk into and do without learning much of anything new. Different tools, different procedures, different work setting, different pace, every one of those things takes the SSA out of the safe harbor.

My job at the hearing is to take that phrase and squeeze every bit of mileage out of it. I cross-examine the vocational expert about the specific job they say my client could do. I ask about the differences between my client’s past work and that proposed job, the equipment, the procedures, the pace, the kind of judgment calls involved. Every difference I can establish takes us further from “very little, if any, vocational adjustment.” Once we are far enough away, the case is supposed to be granted.

I have done this enough times that we very rarely lose these cases on this prong. Hard ones come along now and then, but for the most part the judge agrees that no, my client cannot simply slide into a seated version of their old job and have that count as a successful transition.

Knowing how to win 1% more of the time, across a lot of different small issues like this one, is what separates really good disability lawyers from okay ones. If you are 55 or older and your hearing turns on whether you can shift into a related sedentary job, ask your lawyer how they plan to handle this exact phrase. The answer will tell you a lot.

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