I am looking for concrete insight into the practice of "fee petitioning" by your disability attorney/representative. If you are unfamiliar with the term you should pay very close attention to what I have to say here, because few of you are likely to know the extremes your attorney will go to, to get paid far far above the current $6,000 cap.

In my case, I just won my federally remanded ALJ hearing(my third in ten years)on a bench decision, it took just twenty-five minutes at the hearing, an SSA medical expert testified and gave me a less then sedentary RFC on the spot, this was likely due to the fact that for the first time in the ten years I had been pursuing my benefits, my primary treating doctors medical records were in attendance. I personally got these records after the lies of two previous attorneys came to light, both had insisted that they had done their jobs by getting all of my records, both were lying to me! Thats another story, regardless, after the third attorney also failed to get them, I personally intervened and got them for myself.

These records were absolutely crucial, so crucial that I won the remand hearing in under thirty minutes with them! The third attorney even told me this face to face, he said that these records were so thorough, and over such a long period of time that there was no way an SSA medical expert, or ALJ could reject them. The result being of course the bench decision.

Here's where things get very slimy, the third attorney, who never got the records(I did)came out of of the little hearing room all excited, because we were now talking about a very substantial amount of back benefits, going back almost an entire decade. He let it slip to me that he was going to do a "fee petition" in which he claims to have earned far in excess of the capped $6,000 fee, a claim wholly dishonest, and unsupported by his contribution to the outcome. For example, the week before the hearing he didn't know what my disability even was! The day of the hearing, I noticed he had a very thick file with him which I immediately identified as the records I had mailed to his office six months previously, its all he had with him, nothing else.

Forget that the attorney did nothing to even remotely earn over forty thousand dollars, thats beyond the scope of the post, what he did do knowing full well the desperate state of my affairs, was initiate a "fee petition" which you the reader will find all but impossible to find any references of in any of the literature, or on the various internet ssdi grindhouse law firms explanations of how they get paid, the few references to "fee petitions" all seem to come from SSA itself.. The "fee petition itself causes substantial delay in the processing of your back benefits, maybe as much as a year!!! Do understand, men & women who have won their claims, even on bench decisions as I did, having to wait as much as another year or more to get paid while the SSA is forced to investigate the claims of your attorney! Everything is forced to come to a grinding halt because of the greed of the attorney, who by these actions appear to be all but depraved & indifferent to their clients dire circumstances....

I am looking for comments from those of you who know whats involved here, those who actually were forced to endure this "fee petition" process so that their attorney could bleed them for substantially more money with the full approval of the SSA? I encourage everyone of you to thoroughly question your attorney regarding their deeply deceptive fee structures....Thanks for any substantive responses....