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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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.

[quote=Anonymous]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?[/quote]

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.

[quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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.

[quote=Anonymous]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]

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.[/quote]

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