Monday, January 20, 2014

The 16th Annual Conference on Litigating Disability Insurance Claims in NYC: I Will be There!

This week, I will be in attendance at the 16th Annual Conference on Litigating Disability Insurance Claims in New York City. 
This is the nation's premier conference on Litigating Disability Insurance claims which is led by an unparalleled faculty of jurists, insurance lawyers and claimant's attorneys.
Over the years,I have had the professional satisfaction of representing disability claimants who have concurrent claims for disability benefits from the Social Security Disability programs as well as from private long term disability insurance carriers such as: Cigna, Prudential, Sun Life, the Hartford, Liberty Mutual and Met Life.  There is great deal of interplay between these two types of disability claims and I find that claimants are better served when they have the same attorney representing them in both the Social Security case and the private long term disability claim.  Unfortunately, I find that many claimants are not fully aware of the strong relation between these two sources of disability benefits an fail to contact an attorney early enough to help them with their claim.  
Just last week I assumed the legal representation for a client who was led to believe by Cigna that she did not need an attorney for her LTD claim.  Moreover, she was steered to use the Social Security Disability advocate chosen by Cigna.  Unfortunately, it was not until her LTD claim was denied that she realized that she should have hired a disability lawyer early on to represent her on her Social Security Disability case as well as her LTD claim.  She did not know that probably it would not have cost her any more money to hire a lawyer earlier rather than later.  Many disability lawyers like me work on a contingency basis and, in many instances, it doesn't cost any more money to hire us early on.