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[quote=Anonymous][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]

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."[/quote]

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