Many people are surprised to learn that after an Appeals Council remand, the ALJ who will hear the case will be the same ALJ who originally heard the case. ( Hallex I-2-155). There are certain exceptions to the same ALJ rule. These exceptions include a specific direction from the court…
Social Security Disability process is heavily dependent upon medical records. Those who decide disability case are trained to review, analyze and understand the medical records of a Social Security claimant. Once the records are fully understood, the claim person then makes a determination whether those records prove that the claimant…
As any one knows who has filed a claim for disability benefits, the wait time for a disability hearing can be very long. SSA recognizes that some of its 142 hearing offices across the nation are busier than others. For that reason, it has begun to reassign cases from the…
Over the last few years, the time for the ODAR (Office of Disability Adjudication and Review) Indianapolis Office to process requests for hearings has been around 2 years. That means that from the time a disabled worker files a request for hearing until the time a decision was made and…
The National Ranking Report run for the period ending March 8, 2009 showed that out of the 149 Social Security hearing offices in the United States, the Indianapolis hearing office ranked 146 for processing time. The average number of days it took the Indianapolis hearings office to process a request…
In October 2008, Michael J. Astrue, Commissioner of Social Security announced the beginning of a new program named “Compassionate Allowances.” This program is designed to give very quick (in some instances six to eight days) awards of social security disability for claimants whose medical conditions are so severe that their…
In a recent case decided by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, the judge held that the “law of the case” doctrine applies in Social Security Disability cases. The law of the case doctrine provides that , in a trial following a reversal and remand, if…
NO! Many disabled workers confuse the 12 month durational requirement with a 12 month wait to file a disability claim. These two concepts are very different. One of the requirements for qualifying for Social Security disability is called the durational requirement. This means that a disability must last 12 months…
Indiana has two statutes which may diminish or reduce subrogation liens. The first is I.C. 34-53-1-2. This statutes deals with the reduction of a subrogation lien by the pro-rata share of attorney fees and costs of litigation. The second is I.C. 34-51-2-19. This statute mandates the reduction of a subrogation…
The conclusion by a Social Security Administrative Law Judge that fibromyalgia must not be a debilitating impairment when “practically all tests have been normal” is not an uncommon error. As Judge Chief Judge Posner wrote in Sarchet v. Charter, 78 F.3d 305, 306 (7th Cir. 1996), fibromyalgia is a: “common,…