(light piano music) - So you're service connected
and you can't work, now what?
Remember, tell your story.
My name is Zack Evans, I'm a VA disability benefits attorney
with Woods and Woods Attorneys.
We have to present evidence
that your service-connected conditions
prevent you from working, the VA doesn't budge on this one,
there's a lot of weight to lift.
First off, we wanna talk about
your educational and your work history,
sit down with a piece of paper and a pen,
you can type it out if that's more helpful,
if it's easier for you, we need a full chronology
of all of your training and education
throughout your life and your work history,
so any vocational classes you may have taken in high school,
things you learned in the military,
from basic training, AIT, your MOS specialty,
any times you were cross-trained
into another MOS during service,
any in-service performance evaluations
as to how good you were at this particular task,
promotions, any commendations from your Commanders
or your NCO's above you, anything that speaks
to your level of performance while you were in service.
Additionally, did you attend college?
Was it some college?
Did you graduate?
Did you attend graduate school?
What kind of work were you asked to do?
How strenuous was it?
What field was it in?
What length of time did it take you to finish?
And did you finish?
Every job you've ever had,
from service to exiting the workforce
is going to be very important, we need a listing
of your job skills, responsibilities and any challenges
that you may have encountered
whenever you were in that particular work capacity.
This is very important, the reason for leaving each job
needs to be listed with that particular work opportunity
while you were in the workforce,
especially if you were terminated from that position,
we just need a good, fair, honest accounting
of everything that happened, a good detailed explanation.
The reason your attorneys need this
is because we need to explain the progress
of your medical conditions over time
within the context of your working,
this helps us carry the primary task of telling your story.
Additionally, you want to make a separate list
of your medical conditions,
you wanna know how each one of these
would impact your ability to perform a previous task.
So let's say you were able to do a certain job,
maybe 15 years ago,
but now, your service-connected medical conditions
have advanced and deteriorated to the point
where you're unable to reenter the workforce
in that previous capacity.
So maybe you have all the knowledge,
all the know-how, all of the skills,
it's just that you can't make it through a workday
or you can't see a project through to completion
with the same level of accuracy or proficiency
that you could when you were a younger worker.
So some examples of this, very common one,
a mental health condition and how it affects
stressful work environments and customer interactions.
So if you have some difficulty
dealing with stressful situations,
maybe really just decompensate
when you're on a stressful sales floor
or something like that
and you really start to bristle with customers,
if that's something that happened to you
in a previous work environment,
make sure you write out a detailed description of that,
how those interactions made you feel
and what it would take to sort of come down
from that kind of a decompensation.
Another good example, hearing loss
from aircraft and small arms fire,
this, over time, gets worse and worse,
as I'm sure many of you are familiar with,
tinnitus is often a comorbid condition with hearing loss
and this affects verbal communication.
So if you were primarily working
in customer-facing, in person occupations,
then your hearing loss and your tinnitus
is gonna affect your ability
to understand customers and clearly communicate
their wants and needs to the company.
Another good example, diabetes and peripheral neuropathy
from Vietnam Agent Orange exposure,
this will, over time, affect your fine motor dexterity,
so this can affect tasks like typing and assembly line work,
where you're putting together small items.
This information is conveniently
left out of VA examinations, examiners do not ask about it,
that's because it helps win cases,
the VA won't connect the dots
between your conditions and your inability to work,
so it's up to you and your attorney
to lift the weight and tell your story.
If you have questions about telling your story to the VA
within the context of your past education and work history,
give us a call at Woods and Woods,
we can help you put it together.
(light piano music)