Hired Veterans Attorney Today.

[broncovet]

Its good news for me. Great news. I know people think attorneys make big bucks for almost no work. In Veterans law, my experience has been its not that way at all.

First, Veterans attorney's have to wait 2-5 years before they get paid. Do you know anyone who wants to work that long until payday, and payday may not even come then? Remember, attorneys who represent Vets only get paid when they win, and they dont win 100 percent of the time.

Its a little bit like growing Christmas trees. You plant trees, then wait 5 to 10 years before getting paid.

I talked with 3 different attorneys, and all declined my case but this one. They are "skimming the cream" because they only want cases which are a slam dunk as it costs them thousands of dollars in labor for secretaries and expenses before they can expect a payday, so they only take the cases they are almost certain they can win.

Im very excited an EXPERIENCED Veterans attorney accepted my case. He agreed with me about the hearing loss being rated backwards by VA.

38 CFR 4.85(b) says that the chart is read with speech discrimination in the horizontal, puretone average in the vertical. My RO does it exactly backwards, and gets a lower percentage that way.

I beleive thousands and thousands of hearing impaired Vets are rated wrong, by the VA "switching around" 4.85 (b). I did not even notice that VA did that to me, even tho I looked at it probably 5 times in the past 12 years. Finally, about a month ago, I had an "Aha" moment, and realized that VA did it wrong. This will be a HUGE deal if we win. HUGE. I think it will be bigger than Nehmer, or Bradley vs Peake.

I think the VA will do everything to keep this from being precedential at the CAVC. It would cost them billions and billions. There are many, many many Vets who are hearing loss at 0 or 10% who should probably be 50%.

Edited July 22, 2015 by broncovet

[Wings]

It's not always the pay that motivates an attoney, sometimes they just like to win ;-) Good luck Bronco! Wings

[john999]

And they hate to loose! Is your claim a CUE? I had a lawyer who stuck with me for about 7 years on a CUE I filed. We both thought it was a slam/dunk, but we learned just how tricky the CAVC can be. Lawyers are tricky about doing vet claims where there is a lot of work and a long wait to get paid. I have filed a number of lawsuits over the years and I think most lawyers won't file cases they don't think they will win. They do want to get paid. There are about a million SSDI lawyers and a much smaller number that do VA claims. The SSDI process is orderly while VA is just trying to catch smoke.

John