“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. Continue reading →