Board of Veterans Appeals (Attorney Advisor)
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Anonymous
Lol, take a look at this AFGE union survey regarding the culture of fear and intimidation at the Board of Veterans' Appeals (BVA), and you will see why the signatures in the loss of confidence letter are indistinguishable. See link below. https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track/?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3A4dc55b1b-80ed-4b2c-9e0a-155be961d998&pageNum=1 |
Anonymous
I've worked there for many years and some of what's been posted is still accurate and some of it reads like angry people who struggled at the job. This isn't the job for everyone and some people will think it sucks. But the level of toxicity people are describing is not as pervasive as they make it seem. There has been some turnover at the SES level that bodes well. The chief judges have all been sent back to being regular judges, and so some of the supervisory problems that were around for years are gone now too. Certain chief judges were pretty awful. One extremely negative person in senior leadership retired and was replaced with someone much better. The chairman remains extremely focused on production, but has been doing less of the employee-focused things lately. The quota is still challenging but instead of just a quota based on cases, there's now one also based on issues contained in a case and so there are two ways to meet it now. The issues route was created with the union to help attorneys who get lots of hard cases. There's a claims file browser that makes file review more efficient. Many people here are complaining about the judges and there are a few who are really, really terrible. But, most of them are okay and some are actively good to work for. If you get one of the bad ones, the job will suck, that's the truth. But, odds are the judge you get will be okay. The judges have a quota too and so some of them don't go over your stuff with a fine tooth comb. The claims files are large, but with practice people can learn to review them efficiently. Some estimates of the number of pages in a claims file are being deliberately exaggerated. Yes, there are some files that are huge but there are others that are small. Efficiency is something that has to be learned, and many people can do it just fine. Those who can't will struggle and this probably isn't the job for them. Using the Forum of Hate/FOH as an example of board culture is completely unrealistic. I worked there when it became public. This type of awful behavior was a small group of people and when it was discovered they were dealt with. That was one of the few good things management at the time did well. The things that were said by the FOH are not at all representative of what culture at the board is like. Also, "mass firings" are not a thing. Yes, people have been fired and yes, people resign. But there are no "mass firings." Attrition is high for more than one reason. Some people get stuck with bad judges and leave, but some people just aren't capable of doing the work. The Board has people who can't review files efficiently or are bad writers and so they end up resigning. Most of the attorneys are fine. The angry people are just really loud about it. The Board isn't perfect, but it's slowly getting better. Re: quality of life - remote telework is a great thing and it would be hard to find a federal job where you can live where you want. Or you only have to go to the office 2 days out of every pay period. They're hiring remotely right now because of covid but I don't know if that will last. |
Anonymous
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I have firsthand knowledge of life at the Board.
I agree with you that there are a lot of nice and upstanding judges at the Board. The attorneys who work under these nice judges have probably never encountered the toxic judges. They probably share your view that the attorneys who complain or get fired are poor performers and whiners. If a few attorneys complain, perhaps these attorneys are the problem. But, when nearly 400 attorneys voice concerns about the workplace, perhaps the workplace culture is the problem. Heck even you admit that life would suck if an attorney gets assigned to a toxic judge. Yes, the good judges outnumber the toxic judges, and the odds of getting assigned to a good judge are high. But, keep in mind that are a number of highly toxic judges at the Board who have well known reputations for destroying the careers of people they don't like. If you complain, upper management won't do anything to help and will even set you up to fail. Should the success of an attorney depend on who he or she is assigned to? If an attorney who is assigned to a toxic judge gets fired, would you automatically deem that attorney to be a poor performer? It seems like you are trying to sugarcoat the ways in which toxic judges and managers set their attorneys up to fail. I agree with you that there are no mass firings at the Board; however, they ARE mass "if you don't resign now, you will get fired and won't be able to work in the federal government again." Perhaps in your view that is not the same as a mass firing, but in my view that's pretty much the same thing. As for the Forum of Hate, I also agree with you that the Board took prompt action against the ones who were involved; however, are you aware that FOH targeted very senior managers at the Board? Do you think the management would have handled the matter as swiftly as they did if senior managers were not the victims? I think not. Finally, yes, angry people are usually the loudest. But, when you have hundreds of angry loud people, perhaps it is time to take a look at the workplace culture. |
Anonymous
| Excuse the typo, "they ARE mass". |
Anonymous
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Fyi, here's a link to the union website for Board employees.
https://www.afge.org/local/l0017/ You may be interested in clicking on the link, "Memo COVID 19" which contains a letter from the union president. In his letter dated March 18, 2020, the union president addresses the shameful way that management treated two employees in the middle of the Covid pandemic. The union president states: This morning I spoke with two employees without telework agreements – one with a chronic respiratory condition who commutes from Baltimore and an elderly woman who has given decades of service to the Department. Neither employee was instructed that he/she could stay home to protect their health. Instead, they were both told to come to work. __________________ If you want to work at place where management doesn't respect you or care about your health, by all means, go work for the Board. You're pretty much guaranteed to get a job there because the place is a revolving door; they need warm bodies. |
Anonymous
If you think that the attorneys in the survey are deliberately exaggerating the number of pages in each case file, you may be interested in reviewing the following conversation between Representative Mast and the Chairman of the Board during a Congressional hearing: ---- Representative Mast: How about pages could we be talking about? Chairman Mason: Thousands of pages for one case and if it is multiple issues then tens of thousands of pages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6148&v=AACgoVzBKKg&feature=emb_logo Watch entire section from: 1:44:00 - 1:45:10 ---- It's great that you are able to efficiently review tens of thousands of pages AND write a decision EVERY eight hours. From my experience, the "poor performers" are the ones who fall behind because they refuse to take shortcuts to save their jobs, i.e., not read the entire case file. Please share your secret on how to regularly review tens of thousands of pages a day. |
Anonymous
Your quote of the Chairman's statement is flawed for two reasons. First, you're using her comment about the extreme as the norm. Yes, some cases hit tens of thousands of pages. However that is very unusual and the vast majority are much smaller. Second, the Chairman doesn't actually know how many pages are in a claims file because the Board doesn't keep track of it and it's been a very long time since she reviewed a full record. I do not work at the Board, but I practice before the CAVC and get complete copies of the claims file in each case. The median page count in a claims file that comes to me is ~2,500 pages (meaning half of all cases have fewer than that). I see maybe a dozen cases a year that are over 10,000 and I have seen less than half a dozen ever that are over 20,000. Yes, those beasts exists and no one can claim otherwise and they would suck to work, but they are rare and it is incorrect to claim otherwise. That is not to say that the workload required to review a claims file and write a decision is easy. It's not. Board attorneys have too much work to do and too little time to do it in, and the quality of the decisions they produce suffers greatly as a result. And sometimes people will get fired as a result; probably more often than they should or is acceptable. But sensationalism doesn't help give people a fair assessment of what exactly is going on and whether the Board is a good place to work. Claims files are large, but nowhere near as large as you are alleging. |
Anonymous
I think that your response raises more questions than answers. First of all, if you listen to the entire segment, 1:44:00 - 1:45:10, you will see that the Chairman is discussing everyday cases - Representative Mast asked the Chairman what a day in a life of a Board attorney is like. Do you think the Chairman responded to a "day in a life" question by giving a glimpse of what the extremes of that life are? I think not. Second of all, if the Chairman and upper management don't know what the case files are like, then how do they set the production quota for the work? Isn't the number of pages in a case an important consideration in setting a quota? Finally, how do you know that it has been a long time since the Chairman has reviewed a complete case file? Good leadership entails knowing what the work is like for line employees. Even if we assume that the median number of pages in a case file is 2,500 pages, that means that an attorney has to read over a thousand pages of medical notes and opinions, summarize that evidence in the decision, analyze it, and write a multi-page decision, all in a workday. If you read the union survey, you will see that hundreds of Board attorney find it difficult to do all of that in 8 hours. Though the Chairman stated during the hearing that management requires attorneys to review every document in a case, in practice, the "efficient" attorneys are taking shortcuts by not reviewing every document in the case. In my experience, the ones who read the entire case file are the ones who can't meet the quota and ultimately get fired (being forced to resign has the same effect as a termination). Then people like you coin them as "poor performers." |
Anonymous
The Chairman gave a wide-ranging answer to a wide-ranging question. Congressional hearings are not known for precision in the information conveyed, and that is particularly so for hearings regarding the Board, which throughout my career have generally been so amorphous as to be next to useless for determining what is actually going on.
No, pages have no basis for setting the quota. Never have, and likely never will. This is for a few reasons. First, the Board is evaluated externally based on cases alone and it has not been very successful at conveying the nuance within individual cases, let alone into Congressionally-acceptable metrics. Some attempts have been made to do that by focusing on the number of issues in a case, but the dominant evaluation criteria that all stakeholders care about remains cases as a whole. Second, the Board can't set the production quota based on pages because the databases that track the work don't track the number of pages per claims file. They know the number of documents per claims file, but that's it, and documents is only a partially useful insight into the actual length because of the extreme page ranges per document. So, even if the Board wanted to use pages to determine the quota, they couldn't because they have no data available to do so.
Because this is an anonymous forum you will just have to trust me on that one. The summary is that I've been in this industry for a very long time and I know what I'm talking about.
I do not dispute this at all, nor do I claim the job is easy. I just want to tamp down some of the rhetoric regarding the size of claims files. I'm not saying review is easy or people have enough time to do the work, but throwing around statements about tens of thousands of pages simply isn't an accurate depiction of what the average case is like. |
Anonymous
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Thank you for clarifying that attorneys at the Board only have to review case files containing a median of 2,500 pages of medical records and write a multi-page decision, all within eight hours.
I’m sure that will be of great relief to applicants for Board positions who erroneously believed that they would have to regularly review tens of thousands of pages daily. |
Anonymous
I think it still sounds like federal sh#tlaw kind of like finding out your quota in the local SSDI mill isn't so bad. |
Anonymous
From my experience at the Board, few attorneys read the entire case file. The ones who do usually get fired pretty quickly (or work extensive unpaid overtime) because it isn't possible to read 2,500 pages (or more) and write a 10 page decision in eight hours. It's an open secret that most Board attorneys don't read the case file. In fact, when I joined the Board, the Board's training staff told my class of new attorneys to not read the entire case file. If management didn't know that before the union survey, they sure as heck are aware now following the union survey since the quota was the number one concern among Board attorneys (the number two concern being the mistreatment of employees). Ultimately, the ones who suffer the most are the veterans who are denied a de novo review of their cases. |
Anonymous
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Do NOT work at this job. I've been here 5 years and it is a terrible place to work.
Yes you can work from home but your job is entirely dependent on your supervisor and your individual Judge. In some ways it has improved over the past five years, but it is still a terrible place to work. Boring and repetitive work and management is very hostile to employees. I would agree that its a 50-60 hour a week job, and it is a miserable job unless you get lucky and get a nice Judge. Do yourself a favor and go do something else. |
Anonymous
My agency has attorney-advisors within OGC. All non-litigation attorneys get that title. We’re basically in house regulatory attorneys, and they’re traditional attorney jobs (unlike opinion writer jobs). We’re all eventually land at GS-14s, though there’s an occasional non-supervisory 15 that gets shaken loose for people they don’t want to lose. |
Anonymous
My understanding is that "Attorney-Advisor" is a general job classification/title set by OPM. So, for OPM purposes, one may be considered an attorney-advisor at one agency and do a particular job while at another agency the job could be completely different. |