Reply to Board of Veterans Appeals (Attorney Advisor)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote] you bring up another great point.  When I applied, they promised they would take your real world experience into account when deciding your starting salary/grade.

That's another lie they tell you. Everyone starts at GS 11-1 whether you have one year of litigation experience or 20 years of litigation experience.  I have heard of a few exceptions for people who worked at SSA.  they may start at GS-11 but at a higher grade level.  If you do not have that specific prior experience you will start at GS 11-1, despite what they promise during the recruitment process. [/quote]

The position they hire is GS-11, but steps are negotiable [i googled it when I was job searching]. At BVA, I had to ask after I got the tentative offer and was told the process. I asked for a higher step than I got, but I did get several steps. The final offer included the additional steps. I did not work at SSA but did have experience writing rulings in another agency.

That said, my experience is the majority of the job is file review and notation with much less time writing. Judges want their opinions to be very similar, it makes it easier to process them quickly. The judges are also writers themselves, so they mostly need someone to fill in the blanks about procedural history and evidence in the file and boilerplate and they can tweak it. The snippets are there for a reason.

The job wasn’t horrible but I found the files deadly dull and/or depressing and I did not need to stay long to know I did not like the work. it’s great for the highly independent who want to work from home or live someplace else and make a good salary while having a lot of freedom to structure their time once they know how to quickly and efficiently work the file and plug and chug. It can be done, you just might not want to do it.
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From my experience, BVA will always match the salary of an attorney coming from SSA by giving the attorney a higher GS-11 step (e.g., GS-11, step 8). However, none of my colleagues who came from the private sector or local/state government had their salaries matched, and they joined as GS-11, step 1 attorneys. I've never personally encountered anyone who came from another federal agency. Virtually all of the new hires in my class of 80+ attorneys came from the private sector, local/state government, or SSA. I'm glad to see that BVA will try to match, or at least increase the step level, for attorneys coming from other federal agencies.

Additionally, while I agree that the work at BVA involves file review and tabbing/notating the evidence files for the judge's review, I should note that the job involves a lot more than just file review and tabbing. Management requires attorneys to review the file, tab/notate the file, AND draft a decision within 8-10 hours. Given that an attorney only receives credit after a judge signs his or her draft, it's not advisable to spend a lot of time on file review or tabbing, as those tasks will cut into the attorney's decision writing time. Drafting decisions can be especially difficult for attorneys who work for picky judges, as these attorneys have to revise the returned draft AND draft 3-4 new decisions a week.[/quote]

Yes [b]for people from the private sector they will not salary match or even attempt to give you anything beyond[/b] 11-1.  They laugh at you when you ask. They also claimed at one point that they would give you credit for leave purposes for time spent in the private sector.  Turns out that also wasn't true.

As has been said many times before, whether or not you succeed at the Board all depends on your judge.  Some are easy to work with and want to see you do well, some are terrible people who don't care if you make the quota or not, and don't care how many hours of unpaid overtime it takes you to get there.  But its not so easy as to "fill in the blanks" for most judges, especially as you advance and the cases get more complicated.

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FWIW, while there are regulations governing how pay is set for an existing federal govt employee who transfers, there is no obligation to match pay for those coming from the private sector or state or local govt.  (Ask me how I know.)  Many agencies, if they want you, will match or do something in order to secure you.  Others will not.  When I applied at my agency, they were very clear that if I did not accept the offer, they would move to the next person on the list.

Note that I'm not making any statement on whether that is right, ethical, moral, etc.  It's simply the state of things.[/quote]

That could explain why they don't even attempt to salary match, as apparently they're not required to do so.  It would fit with BVA's overall attitude of doing the absolute minimum in terms of being employee friendly.

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