I had a telephone call yesterday with Sheila Lowther, the Regional Chief Administrative Law Judge for the Social Security’s Region IV, concerning video hearings. She agreed for me to post what she was saying on this blog. I hope this information is also going out through internal channels, I'm happy to provide the information but Social Security employees shouldn't have to hear it from me.
Social Security is starting to roll out video hearings on a limited basis. They’re looking for critical need cases where the claimant has declined a telephone hearing. They're starting with Hearing Office Chief Administrative Law Judges. I told her that in critical cases I’ve been strongly advising my clients to accept telephone hearings so there would be no delay. That means that I won’t have any cases for video hearings unless I start declining telephone hearings for critical cases which I'm reluctant to do because I have no guarantee of a video hearing in the near future. I expect that most Social Security attorneys would be in the same boat. She said they will use the Microsoft Teams platform and that it will work from any device. I was assured that they will have enough bandwidth for this. This has been a concern for me and others. There's a noticeable decline in audio quality when additional callers are added to the telephone hearings they’re doing now suggesting to me that even this old technology might strain Social Security's systems. I hope that that issue has nothing to do with bandwidth. Judge Lowther indicated that they want to fully roll this out as soon as possible but she didn’t predict when that might be.
By the way, it seemed important to Judge Lowther that Administrative Law Judges will appear against an artificially generated backdrop approximating one of the agency’s hearing rooms. I suppose that may be important to ALJs but it really doesn’t matter to me. My job is to pay no attention to such things and to concentrate on the substance of what’s happening.
12 comments:
ALJ's are doing hearings from their homes. Think about this for a moment: claimants - some of whom will be denied- would be able to see the inside of the judge's home. Maybe not that big of a deal- but any additional risk to an ALJ's family because of their job is not acceptable. The background is a good try to mitigate that (and to keep it looking professional) but many ALJ's are not happy about this.
"but many ALJ's are not happy about this."
After years of reading a certain message board whose link has been removed from this blog, I feel certain many ALJ's would complain even if SSA gave each one $1,000,000 pay raise and $20,000 office chair with gold trim to sit on while conducting the hearings.
Re: 9:00 -
While I'm sure you would like to start an argy-bargy on this subject based on the insulting tone of your remark, your comment is pedantic and extraneous. Crawl back into the darkness and spew your bitterness and petty opinions elsewhere.
Our firm has done a handful of these hearings in September and have a handful more in October. My first impression is very positive. There was very little, to no, lag. We didn't talk over each other because everyone can see when the other was done answering questions. The ALJ had a virtual background so you wouldn't tell they were working at home.
The entire process was seamless. The e-mails with links to the meeting went out timely and our clients had no problems finding Teams on their app stores. Honestly, I was surprised how smooth it went.
@10:01 AM
Sure, I'm the one being petty; not the folks complaining about being given features that will protect their privacy and pose virtually no inconvenience to them at all.
I hate this, can you please open up the office so I can go in and hold the Video hearings? I hate working from home, I do not telework, I want to keep my home life separate and apart from my work life
@11:04 AM
I recommend setting aside a small space in your home to work from, outside of your bedroom and the common living areas, which you should already be doing to protect privacy anyway. I know telework isn't ideal for everyone. But sometimes we have to make sacrifices to protect our fellow countrymen. And if you're qualified to serve as an ALJ, then you're capable of doing it from home.
I have done video hearings for worker compensation claim. My first one, the Judge was in her dining room (wearing her robe) and defense counsel was in his garage. Court reporter was in her home study. I was in my office, my client was in my conference room. No.one.cared. We were just happy not to have to do the hearing by telephone.
@11:47 am. All good points. It's not that cumbersome compared to what many folks are going through these days.
Not really sure exactly why anybody needs to be on the video except the ALJ and claimant. The interaction between them is the most important. Everybody else like attorneys, MEs, and VEs can be via phone.
In this day and age, it should not be too difficult. I am just worried if my clients have the best equipment for this. Most claimants have phone and presumably equipped for video. But maybe not all.
In a civil matter, not Social Security, the State was using Microsoft Teams but we could not make it work on a Mac using Safari. It work when we switched to Chrome. I hate Chrome and Firefox but will adjust. Be interested if anyone has been able to get it to work on a Mac using Safari.
I'm fine with the artificial background. Beats having my mistress accidentally walking naked to the shower behind me during a hearing.
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