That 20-minute phone call with a retired judge changed how I read denial letters

I was griping to my uncle's buddy, a retired administrative law judge from Sacramento, about my friend's SSDI denial and he told me to look for the 'residual functional capacity' section first, not the reasons. He said most lawyers skip straight to the medical evidence and miss that the judge basically writes the whole outcome into that one part, and sure enough my friend's denial letter had a clear mismatch between what the doc said and what the judge decided. Has anyone else tried reading the RFC section before anything else, or is that just a quirk of us laypeople?

1 comments

1 Comment

juliashah19d ago

The RFC section really is the smoking gun because it forces the judge to spell out what you can and cannot do in plain work terms, and that's where their bias shows up if they ignored your doctor. My buddy found his denial letter said he could do light work, but the doctor's own notes said he couldn't even stand for an hour, so the judge basically wrote fiction into the form. Reading it first is like checking the score before watching the game, you know the ending before you waste time on the boring parts.