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[quote=Anonymous][quote=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:

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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
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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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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