You do not need a lawyer to represent you in a disability retirement case. There is no rule that you do. Plus, not only are lawyers too expensive, but graduation from law school is not necessary to winning disability retirement. Experience and knowledge of what OPM wants to hear and shouldn’t hear, is paramount. You don’t need to be a lawyer for that. What you need is someone who has done many many such cases. What you need is experience. And it is not experience in the law that you should be looking for. That is a minor factor. Experience in getting OPM to exercise its discretion and grant you disability retirement is the big one. If I were starting up a business today, I would set up an office with lots of non-lawyers, give them intense training in how disability retirement works and then supervise them as they get lots of experience in helping Federal employees get disability retirement. We could charge far less then any lawyer charges and do just as good a job. As a Federal employee applying for disability retirement, this is going to be your first try. You haven’t done a single case. You have absolutely no experience. You think that you can win on your own and you may be able too. But, “may win” is not your goal. Winning is your goal. If you go it alone, you will have to guess at what OPM wants to hear and should not be told. Many people think that it is slam-dunk and just a bunch of forms that you have to fill out. Think that way and you have already lost. OPM disability retirement has little to do with filling out forms. OPM disability retirement has everything to do with persuasion. You have to persuade them by feeding them with information which they want to hear and screening out information which you know they should not hear. Caveat: there are ethical bounds to this sceening-out of information and I’ll discuss that in a later post. Don’t be a smarty-pants. Someone who has done many many disability retirement cases is much more likely to know what OPM wants to hear and shouldn’t hear, then you are. So, while you don’t need a lawyer, you need someone with lots of experience to help you. Unfortunately, I don’t know people other than lawyers who have lots of experience in dealing with OPM disability retirement cases. There are other types who seem to have that experience, like union representatives, but check out their experience carefully. You would think that HR (Human Relations) people, who process these cases at your agency would know exactly what you should do. Good luck. Most of them will just tell you that it is easy to do it on your. That is exactly the wrong answer. That HR person may just be too lazy to help or even worse, doesn’t know how to do it themselves. Then too, you don’t want a general practitioner who does divorces, real estate closings and an occasional disability retirement case. Don’t be bamboozled just because he or she has the title “lawyer.” And don’t limit your search for a lawyer to where you live or in your state, to the exclusion of a lawyer somewhere far away. Proximity to you means nothing. You don’t need to be offered a cup of coffee in a fancy lawyers’ office. The practice of law these days, in disability retirement cases, does not require you to ever visit or see the lawyer. Working over the internet, by email, fax and phone works perfectly. In fact, if I lived in Podunk, USA, I would rather have a lawyer close to OPM in Washington, DC who specializes in OPM disability retirement cases, then some lawyer in Podunk, who doesn’t.

What a great leap forward for a drug company to get doctors to put a disposable sheet on their examining room table blazing with the Viagra logo as a billboard for their product.

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