When your Social Security disability claim is denied you appear before an administrative law judge for a hearing. Most hearings in our area are assigned to an administrative law judge in the Office of Hearings Operations (OHO) in Florence, AL.
You chance of getting paid does not depend all that much on the type of disability you have, the medical evidence, or the opinion of your doctors. It depends, as much as anything else, on the judge who is assigned to hear your case. Judges have different personalities, different styles and apparently different views about disability.
Some judges may pay over 70 percent of the cases they hear, while others may pay as as low as 19 percent of their hearings.
Do some judges hear essentially different types of cases so that fact would account for the radically different award rates? No, since cases are assigned at random on an equal basis to all judges in the office. It's not like one judge is hearing cancer cases and another is only hearing less serious medical impairments. They all hear the same type of cases over a period of a year or two.
Based on data provided by OpenGov@Social Security, here are the recent award (approval) rates of judges in the Florence hearing office, highest to lowest:
Judge A 84 percent (awarded 168 out of 221 cases)
Judge B 76 percent (awarded 371 out of 441 cases)
Judge C 68 percent (awarded 271 out of 398 cases)
Judge D 53 percent (awarded 83 out of 257 cases)
Judge E 35 percent (awarded 108 out of 305 cases)
Judge F 20 percent (awarded 64 out of 316 cases)
Judge G 19 percent (awarded 42 out of 221 cases)
So, if you are coming up for a hearing, the single biggest factor seems to be which judge will be assigned to your case.
As you can see, there is little uniformity among the judges. As Dirty Harry would ask, "Do you feel lucky?"
So on a lucky day you could walk into a hearing with judge B and have a much higher chance of approval compared to appearing before judge F or G on the unluckiest day of your life.
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