gRada

My advice is to get an attorney, but in the interest of full disclosure, I am an attorney. You can have an attorney represent you now, he/she just has to do it for free at this point because attorneys are statutorily prohibited from charging fees to veterans for assisting on initial claims. Attorneys are permitted to charge up to a 33.3% contingency fee (the norm in personal injury cases) of any back pay won on appeal, but the VA will only direct-pay the attorney if the contingency fee is 20% or less, which is why you see most attorneys contingency fee set at 20%. Anything over that and the attorney has to collect the fee directly from the veteran, which I think what Mags1023 is describing. In my opinion, the benefit of having an attorney this early on is that they will (should) be there as your resource to guide you through your initial claim. They should be prepping you for your C&P exams, letting you know what the symptoms for each step in rating is, answering any questions you have, helping you write your statement of support, tracking down records, etc. Ideally, you should never have a reason to come on here and ask a question. The result is that you could end up with a better prepared initial claim and get what you want sooner rather than on appeal.* It's also nice to have someone there who's been through the process and can monitor and control everything. As for your question about speeding the process up, the answer is mixed. First, attorneys don't have any special power or status to speed up the VA's process, but you might see "speedier" results coming in the form of a quicker decision because of a well prepared claim. Of course results like that vary greatly between attorneys as everyone is different. *(People will say that it's not in an attorneys interest to "win" an initial claim, but I would argue that an attorney who who purposely submits a weak initial claim in the hope of getting paid on appeal is committing malpractice and would be subject to disbarment and revocation of VA accreditation.)