| Natalia Jofre: | Welcome to the Hill and Ponton disability blog. I’m Natalia Jofre. I’m the Social Security Director here at Hill and Ponton. |
| Shelly Campbell: | I’m Shelly Campbell. I’m the Senior Social Security Attorney at the firm. |
| Natalia Jofre: | The last couple of blogs, we’ve been talking about age and how it affects your disability claim. Really big deal, because it’s going to determine which category you’re in. |
| Shelly Campbell: | Exactly, which will then determine which rules are going to apply when they’re evaluating your claim. |
| Natalia Jofre: | Quick recap, 18 to 49, younger individual, hardest category to be in. |
| Shelly Campbell: | Definitely. |
| Natalia Jofre: | Age 50 to 54, closely approaching advanced age, gray area. |
| Shelly Campbell: | Correct. |
| Natalia Jofre: | Then we get to advanced age, which is age 55 to 59. |
| Shelly Campbell: | That is correct. |
| Natalia Jofre: | Do you want to talk a little bit about that? |
| Shelly Campbell: | Sure. That is the most favorable age group for Social Security, for sure. That’s because at 55, Social Security realizes that you have a certain skillset at that point, and the likelihood that an employer is going to retrain someone when they’re that close to retirement is really low. As you had mentioned on an earlier video, if we can prove that the person’s over 55, they cannot perform their past work, and that they don’t have any transferable skills to work that would accommodate them, then they’re disabled by statute. It doesn’t always go that smoothly. |
| Natalia Jofre: | Yeah, because you said “by statute” … |
| Shelly Campbell: | Right. |
| Natalia Jofre: | … so what you mean is … |
| Shelly Campbell: | The law. |
| Natalia Jofre: | Technically speaking … |
| Shelly Campbell: | Exactly. |
| Natalia Jofre: | … according to the law, they should be found disabled. |
| Shelly Campbell: | That’s correct. |
| Natalia Jofre: | There’s a reason why there are so many attorneys practicing Social Security law, because what should happen isn’t what actually happens normally. |
| Shelly Campbell: | That’s correct. |
| Natalia Jofre: | That’s where you come in. |
| Shelly Campbell: | Right. |
| Natalia Jofre: | You break it down and basically explain this is transferable, this is not. They can’t be retrained. |
| Shelly Campbell: | Right. That’s exactly right. The clarification or the analysis really occurs at the hearing, most times. |
| Natalia Jofre: | Because normally at the initial and reconsideration level, they’re really not … They’re supposed to look at it. |
| Shelly Campbell: | They’re supposed to. That’s correct. |
| Natalia Jofre: | Supposed to look at it. They’re supposed to look at it, but one of the things that you touched on … And I think we need to talk a lot more about this in a different blog … is where you talked about misclassification. |
| Shelly Campbell: | Right. Definitely. |
| Natalia Jofre: | That’s huge. |
| Shelly Campbell: | It’s a really big deal, and it happens a lot. With our clients that we start cases with early on, we counsel them, we assist them, we help them complete those work history forms. It is a big deal. I’ve had a judge in a hearing find a client not credible because their testimony did not match that work history report, which we did not help them with. It is very, very important to take that form very seriously. |
| Natalia Jofre: | Okay. That’s a big deal. We’ll probably talk about that in a separate blog. We’ll dedicate it to that, basically explain how you fill that out. It’s not about a right or wrong answer. It’s about people not understanding the question. Wouldn’t you say that? |
| Shelly Campbell: | That’s correct. Absolutely. Also, just one other thing for this age category. This is the age category to where if you have always performed highly skilled work and you have maybe some non-exertional issues or limitations which would be behavioral or emotional or things like that preventing your type of work, Social Security is not allowed to say that you can perform unskilled work. |
| This is a situation to where if you had someone that was performing really high skilled work, and let’s say for whatever reason they were injured, and now they’re having to take a bunch of pain medication or they’re just in pain all the time, the difficulty that they would have with their focus and concentration would prevent them from sustaining work that would require that type of detail. In those situations, these people would be once again, disabled by statute. | |
| Natalia Jofre: | I can think of one easily, which would be a traumatic brain injury, right? |
| Shelly Campbell: | Absolutely. |
| Natalia Jofre: | Happen all the time in car accidents, and so then … |
| Shelly Campbell: | Right. Correct. Veterans as well. Any kind of highly skilled work and then traumatic brain injury or PTSD or anxiety disorders. This age group is where any of those issues is going to assist more in finding the claimant disabled. |
| Natalia Jofre: | Okay. Great. Next blog, we’ll talk about closely approaching retirement age or retirement age, and we’ll talk about that and how that all works. |
| Shelly Campbell: | Sounds good. |
| Natalia Jofre: | All right. Great. Thanks for joining us. If you have any questions or are interested in pursuing a claim, feel free to visit our website hillandponton.com or call our office. Thanks for visiting with us. |
| Shelly Campbell: | Thank you. |
Video Blog – Sequential Eval Process – Step 5 – Advanced Age
