There is a lot of work involved in representing a claimant in a Social Security disability case. To start with, an initial application has to be filed. This requires a representative to make sure all of a claimant’s medical providers from the previous 12 months are listed on the application and going over a claimant’s work history for the past 15 years, in addition to other tasks. After the initial application is complete and sent off to Social Security it will be the representative’s responsibility file all subsequent appeals, request medical opinions from providers and to advise on all other paperwork Social Security sends out for the next two-plus years of a claim.
This alone is a lot of work, but the bulk of the work really comes when the representative is preparing for the hearing before an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ). All of the claimant’s medical records for several years will have to be collected and paid for by the representative, but then the representative needs to review all the records collected.
It is not uncommon for more than 1,000 pages of medical records to be submitted on a claim. According to Judge Marilyn Zahm, the president of the Association of Administrative Law Judges, up to 30 percent of all hearing files now contain more than 1,000 pages of medical records.
When a representative has to review that many pages of medical records for a case it takes a lot of time. A work analysis study commissioned by the AALJ indicated that it would take more than seven hours to process and review a case that contained a little more than 650 pages of records.
The disturbing trend is that case files tend to be increasing and including more medical records than before. Considering that the ALJ has to review the records just like the representative does, it is just another reason why the amount of time claimants wait for a hearing to be scheduled is increasing.
