Dispositions | ALJ Discussion Forum (2024)

Looking at ALJ disposition data for FY 2023, I saw nobody that had reached the magic number of 500. I did not look all that carefully so maybe people did and I missed it; I did see at least one "499". Unless I somehow misread the data, it seemed clear that the vast majority did not, and did not even come particularly close, to 500 dispositions.

Is it even conceivable that management has stopped badgering people about this? I would have trouble believing this, in particular because one of the main requirements for recent hirings appears to have been a willingness to assert [and/or the ability to get one's references to say] that he or she would easily crank out at least 500 dispositions a year under whatever ridiculous conditions management imposed or created.

500 is still the goal. That hasn’t changed. However, as has been stated, they can’t really complain when you can’t schedule full dockets for judges. Simply not possible to hit 500 when 30-35 are being scheduled every month.

So now what our excellent leaders are doing to make up for it is violate the scheduling MOU by scheduling cases in violation of the page count, remands, etc. Their apparent position is if they are unable to schedule a full day of cases in accordance with the MOU, they can simply ignore the MOU. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will be coming soon to an office near you.

There are many reasons why SSA rates so poorly in employee satisfaction—this ridiculous requirement is one of them. We recently had an ALJ meeting where we were told that our office is on OCALJ’s radar because our availability is below expectations—meaning the golden 50 a month and that we needed to add more available days.

All a farce, I provided availability for 50 cases in January and just saw that all the cases they could muster for this availability were 20. Of these I will likely get at best 13 dispositions for the month with others being PP, RTS or going to POST for development. How am I supposed to even come close to 250 with this amount of scheduled cases?

This is something I do not understand. There was a time when every week, our local PGS was getting hit up to ship cases to other offices. RO was aggressively moving cases from office to office to "balance the workload" even if that meant one week cases were sent out and the next we received from other offices. It made not sense to look at it that frequently, and had the office been left alone, our writers could have managed our cases just fine.

Yet, I have not seen any effort to "balance the workload" for the ALJs. We went months have just a few dockets scheduled while other offices maintain their normal load. In January, I have 42 cases scheduled and this judge has 20. With all the video/phone dockets, they could easily spread cases around and maybe if each judge did 30ish for now, we could do a better job of case review, instruction writing and editing.

(BTW - If you can turn your cases, 42 a month is the magic number to reach 500, assuming you can average that many hearings)

I am not sure what data you are looking at, but the publicly available data does show judges who reached 500 dispos (approximately 18), with many more over 450.

www.ssa.gov/appeals/DataSets/03_ALJ_Disposition_Data.html

However, all any of us can dispose of is obviously limited by the number we can get

How stringent the 500-drumbeat is pounded, may depend on your office

I put more than 500 in box every year for 8 straight years. Then I had health issue and just missed. Got back with the plan and then COVID.

Powers that be can tout 500 but that number was pulled from an orifice with no research to justify it.

The work year is 2087 hours and 80 of those hours were holidays so it works out to 1.99 per day. We’ve added an additional holiday so if there were rational basis it would have been reduced to 498.

Anyone who actually touches files knows there is more medical than a decade ago. Then again the mission is legally adequate uh sufficient.

The Hearing offices cannot schedule enough cases for the judges they have but at least one region in that position is now hiring senior judges. Go figure…

The chief judges office now is obsessively, focused on average processing time but region four, the largest region in the country, has ordered their offices not to backfill any cases for January or February, thus effectively delaying average processing time and making some claimants wait longer to have their case.

If it’s 50/50 you are ahead of the game….

DispositionsDec 22, 2023 11:44:20 GMT -5via mobile