Regardless of your impairment, the ALJ and the vocational expert will discuss information that is highly personal at a disability hearing. Frequently, disability claimants feel understandably embarrassed by symptoms of their disease, tests, procedures, or by treatments they have undergone.
Full Answer
Some judges will look for a reason to deny your claim if they sense you have given up and decided for yourself that you are disabled. You want to present yourself as a fighter – unhappy with your current medically unemployed status and ready to try anything to get back to work.
First, the judge will ask your name, date of birth, address, and possibly your Social Security Number. Second, you will usually be asked if you were in the military and if you are married, single, or divorced. These are questions that are easy for most people. However, after those questions, you will be asked about your disability.
Social Security disability judges are under a great deal of pressure to only approve deserving cases. While outright fraud is relatively rare, judges are nevertheless trained to be skeptical about every claimant they see.
The most important way to answer an ALJ's question is with honesty. Some claimants feel that if they make their symptoms sound worse than they really are, they will have a better chance at winning their claim. However, exaggerating your disability usually has the opposite affect. Remember that ALJs hear hundreds of cases a year.
Making Statements That Can Hurt Your Claim – Unless you are specifically asked pertinent questions, do not talk about alcohol or drug use, criminal history, family members getting disability or unemployment, or similar topics. However, if you are asked directly about any of those topics, answer them truthfully.
While the DDS office reviews applications and makes recommendations to the SSA, it is the SSA which makes the final decision to accept or reject claims for disability benefits.
Not all CE Exams end in disability denials, but many do. It's sad, but very often these exams are scheduled just so that the examiner can have an excuse to close the case.
4 Steps to the Social Security Disability Determination ProcessStep 1: Initial Application. To be awarded disability benefits, you first have to assert your right to them. ... Step 2: Reconsideration. ... Step #3: Hearing. ... Step #4: Appeals Council and Beyond.
1. Arthritis. Arthritis and other musculoskeletal disabilities are the most commonly approved conditions for disability benefits. If you are unable to walk due to arthritis, or unable to perform dexterous movements like typing or writing, you will qualify.
Step 5: Any Other Work. Finally, if someone is found to not be able to do their past relevant work, SSA or the ALJ must determine whether they can do any other work in the national economy, considering that person's age, educational background, work experience, and, of course, impairments.
In most cases, it takes 3 to 5 months to receive a decision. However, how long it takes to collect your medical records and any other evidence needed to make a determination will determine the exact timing. Your application will be forwarded to a state organization that conducts disability determinations.
The Social Security Administration makes it clear to the consulting doctors who conduct the medical exams for Social Security that the doctor's examination report should be sent to DDS within 10 business days from the date of the exam. This means basically two weeks.
After filing your application, you generally receive your initial decision between one and four months. Your initial application for Social Security Disability benefits, whether filing for SSDI or SSI, is completed online via Social Security's website.
Step 2: A medical screen to deny applicants without a severe impairment. An applicant is denied at step 2 if his or her impairment(s) is considered not severe.
Social Security typically pays past-due SSDI in a lump sum within 60 days of the claim being approved. If a lawyer or other professional advocate represented you in your disability case, the SSA will pay their fee out of your back pay.
STEP 4: Can you do the work you did previously? If your condition is severe, but not at the same or equal severity as an impairment on the list, then Social Security must determine if your disability interferes with your ability to do the work you did during the last 15 years.
U.S. labor force statistics are used to identify jobs in the national economy. At this final step in the disability evaluation process, there are legal presumptions about how a person’s age, education and skill levels affect the ability to perform work they have never performed before.
Yes, you guessed it, that term also has a specific legal definition. “Any other work” means jobs that exist in significant numbers in the national economy. By far, this is the most complicated step in the disability evaluation process.
If you have been denied disability by Social Security, there is something you can do. Cox Disibility Law, LLC has been handling Social Security Disability cases for more than 30 years. If we can help you turn your disability denial into an approval, give us a call at 800-930-1205.
Few people understand that Social Security disability decisions are made by applying a standard legal formula, following five steps in order. If, at any step in the process, a judge can make decision to completely deny or allow disability, he or she will not continue on to assess the other factors.
Working means engaging in “substantial gainful activity.”. This means that if the person is working and has gross wages above a certain amount, they cannot be found disabled, and will be denied disability without any consideration of medical conditions.
Age, education, work experience, skill level, and transferability of skills are all combined with the classification of the persons physical and mental work restrictions to create a vocational profile. If that profile matches a job or jobs that exist in the national economy, the person will be found “not disabled”.
If the profile does not match up with any of those jobs, then the person is considered “disabled” under the law.
The main thing you can do to help yourself is to think about your disability and how it keeps you from working. Specifically, the Judge wants to know how much you can lift, how long you can sit, stand and walk, and if you are able to concentrate on job instructions.
SSA hearings are informal. They are also private, which means the public cannot come in and out of the court room. The only people who will listen to your testimony are the people in the hearing. This is typically the Judge, your attorney, the court reporter, and possibly a vocational or medical expert who is hired by the SSA. ...
The panic attack would last 30 minutes and during that time I would have to go to the break room.”. If you answer like this, you have helped the Judge understand that at least once a week, due to panic attacks, you would be away from your work station for at least 30 minutes.
So, instead of answering with general statements, be specific. Likewise, if the judge asks how many pounds you can lift, the answer isn’t “not very much.”. The answer is 5, 10, or the number of pounds you could lift repetitively throughout ...
The answer is 5, 10, or the number of pounds you could lift repetitively throughout the course of an 8-hour workday without pain. You need to explain all of your physical limitations with a number. If you cannot sit for more than 15 minutes at a time, tell the Judge.
First, the judge will ask your name, date of birth, address, and possibly your Social Security Number. You will usually be asked if you were in the military and if you are married, single, or divorced. These are questions that are easy for most people. However, once those questions are answered, you will be asked about your disability.
If you cannot walk for more than 10 minutes at a time due to back pain or some other problem, tell the Judge. The more specific you are in your answers, the more the Judge will understand your limitations.
A good disability lawyer will develop the best theory of disability for winning your case, prepare you for your hearing, and arrange for witnesses. Hearing approval rates are about twice as high for applicants who bring lawyers. To learn how a disability lawyer handles other aspects of your case and appeal hearing, ...
If your attorney attempts to cover-up the evidence or mislead the ALJ about its importance, both you and your attorney's credibility will be damaged.
Your attorney will ask your doctors for supportive statements, submit only the relevant medical records to the judge, and know how to handle bad evidence. In preparing to represent you in a disability appeal hearing, your attorney will want you to answer some detailed questions about your symptoms and limitations.
Your attorney will review the medical records to see what is relevant to your case and submit only that information to Social Security. Because of their heavy caseloads, administrative law judges (ALJ) do not have the time to sift through hundreds of pages of documents to determine what is relevant and what isn't.
Your lawyer can request that a medical expert be at your hearing (by phone). If your records contain statements about drug or alcohol abuse, it will be especially important for your lawyer to explain to the ALJ what you are doing to treat your addiction.
In the past, Social Security had to give more weight to the opinions of treating doctors who have treated you for a period of time, who know your medical history, and are supportive of your disability claim. As of March 27, 2017, this is no longer true.
When trying to prove that you can do what Social Security calls "less than sedentary work," your attorney will need medical evidence to prove that you have certain functional limitations, like not being able to lift ten pounds or needing to lie down frequently during the day .
But since most hearings will normally be concluded under an hour (some hearings can actually be as short as 15 minutes), you can count on not having to answer questions for an extended time period. (Read about what happens at a disability hearing .)
Representation at Your Hearing. Having legal representation at a disability hearing, in the form of an experienced disability lawyer or non-attorney representative, can help you answer the questions in a way that will help support your disability claim rather than possibly undermine it. A disability advocate can provide you with pre-hearing ...
If the ALJ believes you are exaggerating your symptoms, you will lose credibility with the ALJ, and if an ALJ doesn't believe you, you will likely lose your claim for disability benefits. For example, if the ALJ asks you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten on an average day, it would be unwise to answer that your daily pain is at a ten.
Medical records sometimes contain "bad" facts. "Bad" facts can hurt your case if they are not handled properly. For example, one common problem with people who suffer from chronic pain is over-reliance on pain medication. In these cases, medical records may state that the claimant suffers from narcotic dependency or is suspected of abusing pain medication. Here, the worst thing a claimant can do is to deny the problem or try to blame the medical provider. The best answer is the truthful one—for example, that there was a problem with pain medication and you are receiving (or plan to get) treatment for the dependency, or that you switched or reduced medications to minimize the possibility of addiction. (For more information on how prescription drug use can affect your claim, see our article on whether you can get disability if you are suspected of drug overuse .)
Be Honest and Don't Exaggerate. The most important way to answer an ALJ's question is with honesty. Some claimants feel that if they make their symptoms sound worse than they really are, they will have a better chance at winning their claim. However, exaggerating your disability usually has the opposite affect.
For most claimants, the hearing process is a nerve-wracking experience. If, like many of us, you are prone to ramble on when under pressure, it's important that you be especially prepared to provide succinct answers to the ALJ's questions.
Additionally and, perhaps, more importantly, a disability representative can answer many of the judge's questions that arise at a disability hearing. Here are some other ways that having a disability lawyer can help you win your hearing.
The key to success at your disability hearing is preparation. A good lawyer will ask the same probing questions as the judge and when you prepare with your lawyer you get the benefit of expert advice about how to best answer.
If the judge asks you what you do during the day, it is okay to say that you make yourself a quick breakfast or cup of coffee, that you watch TV, check your email or even that you spend time doing light cleaning, caring for pets or checking your email.
Our experience has been that judges don’t expect disability claimants to sit at home in a recliner all day long, moaning in pain. Your activities should not be equivalent to work but you will not be penalized if you maintain some form of routine. The key to success at your disability hearing is preparation.