Social Security is changing its rules to centralize acceptance of legal process. To explain, Social Security gets sued many thousands of time a year. The vast majority are appeals in disability cases. If you sue someone, you have to tell them they've been sued. This can be referred to as "legal process." Up to this point, where you sent the legal process depended upon where the lawsuit was filed. Now, they will all be sent to the same place. This has to do with changes at Social Security's Office of General Counsel (OGC) but also with changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. This change will appear in the Federal Register (where official federal announcements are published) tomorrow.
9 comments:
Footnote 4's hyperlink is broken (it's including the end parenthesis and semicolon at the end) but if I'm reading this right, we no longer are going to be mailing summonses and complaints? The Courts are doing it?
The beauty is in this part:
Under the new rules, plaintiffs in these cases are no longer required to serve a summons and complaint by mail on us, the United States Attorney’s Office, and the Attorney General. Rather, the plaintiff need only file a complaint in district court in accordance with Rule 2 of the Supplemental Rules, and service is accomplished under Rule 3 by the district court’s transmission of a “Notice of Electronic Filing” to the appropriate OGC office and United States Attorney’s Office. We will accept electronic service in these cases,5and are updating our regulations to align them with the procedures for the processing and handling of cases affected by the new FRCP.
SSA seldom loses t such suits ..even when they escalate to Class Actions. I welcome input.
@5:04PM: Are you kidding? SSA loses lawsuits all the time! More than half the time, in many jurisdictions. And that’s not even counting the constant flow of cases that SSA remands voluntarily upon realizing that the claimant was in fact willing to go to court. The agency is a laughing stock among the federal judiciary.
@5:04
Representing claimants in Court, we win well more than half our suits. We actually probably get a stipulation to remand in slightly less than half.
@ 5:04
Again....are you kidding? If you want to be proved wrong, just look at the numbers, EAJA fee awards to us federal court litigators paid by SSA was over $46 million in 2021. You don't get that by losing cases in USDC. These decisions are very often voluntarily remanded as indefensible junk after the opening brief. I see cases that have the medical wrong, indecipherable rationale, and skipping over all the evidence that supports disability.
https://www.ssa.gov/open/data/EAJA.html
Depends on the Judge/Magistrate or circuit you are in. Some judges will defend ANYTHING that SSA decides.
This is a welcome change. One of the few district courts I frequent has had electronic notice for SSD claims for years. Truly do not understand the pointless procedural differences between district courts in the same Circuit. For example, the Southern District of New York has 3-4 extra meaningless procedural hurdles compared to the Northern District for SSD filings. And for some odd reason they also make the SSA transcript far less usable (it is broken up into 3-4 different exhibits and often has an incomplete index).
More than half of my federal court appeals end up as voluntary remands in the 2nd Circuit. My last case did not even require briefing due to incredibly sloppy ALJ decision. What is sad is this same ALJ just denied two more of my claims that I believe are even stronger--yet these clients now have to wait a year just to get to Federal Court. One of these clients just filed for bankruptcy.
@5:04 of course we win a good amount or we wouldn't be taking cases to Federal Court.
As a side note, let's be clear. This new rule benefits SSA because if we no longer have to prepare summonses and prepare service of process that will be one less item that we can bill for EAJA fees and that saves SSA money when they lose. Given how often I've seen them protest EAJA fee claims for preparing summonses, this is one way to resolve the issue for them. If we don't have to do summonses, we won't bill under EAJA for them and they thus won't have to continue protesting those charges.
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