“Do I have a good case?”  Inevitably I hear this question from every client I meet.  I hear it again during my pre-hearing conference and I hear it again immediately after the hearing.

If you have been waiting for disability benefits for 2+ years, you don’t care about statistics, about Social Security’s re-engineering, new Judges, processes to eliminate backlogs or anything other than whether you won.  And I would consider you perfectly reasonable to take this stance.

At the end of the day, however, I am not the one who makes the decision in your hearing.  My job is to identify the best argument supporting your claim for disability and to ask you the right questions to present that argument to the judge.  Beyond that, you can only hope that your judge is rational, reasonable and that he takes the time to listen to you.

My colleague, Maine Social Security disability lawyer Gordon Gates has published a very interesting article on his blog entitled “The 11 Percent ALJ.”  In this article Gordon notes references a project undertaken by a newspaper in Oregon to evaluate the “approve rate” of the Administrative Law Judges presiding over hearings in that State.  It turns out that one of these Oregon judges approves only 11% of the cases he hears, whereas the average approval rate for judges in Oregon is just over 50%.   And since judges are assigned randomly, there is nothing you can do if you are unlucky enough to draw the judge that denies close to 90% of his cases, whereas the claimant in the hearing room next to you has at least a 50/50 chance at winning.

Over the years I have appeared before some of the judges who appear to believe that the fate of the U.S. economy depends on their denying as many claims as possible.  However, I can tell you that information about individual judges’ approval rates is very difficult to get.  The Oregon newspaper had to file a Freedom of Information Request and Social Security is very reluctant to release information about the approval rates of individual judges.

Now I can understand why an ALJ would not want the general public second guessing raw data about his performance in office.  However, Social Security owes the general public, and especially claimants who have waited years for a decision, an expectation of a fair hearing.  In my view a judge who approves significantly fewer cases than his peers ought to be reviewed and asked to justify his performance.