If you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s helpful to remember that it’s really, really, REALLY hard to be a disability or personal injury attorney (or, for that matter, a paralegal or administrative assistant in these practice areas). For any one case, no matter how hard you work, there’s always more you can do.
And, of course, you don’t have just one case, you’ve got dozens or hundreds, and these clients need your attention — even as you’re trying to find new ones so you can keep this whole ship above water. Throw in deadlines, judicial “idiosyncrasies,” occasional human error, not to mention personal commitments, and it’s easy to understand why we’re so stressed out.
But of all the problems we face, there’s a particularly nasty and persistent one: the fundamental matter of how to prove the severity of a client’s injury or illness. This is especially difficult — seemingly impossible — when a client’s symptoms are subjective and or variable: pain is the biggie here but fatigue and altered moods are a problem as well.
Even when a client is compliant with treatment (which you know you can never take for granted) there’s always that gap, often a big gap, between the medical records and your client’s daily experience of their life after major injury or illness. A significant part of our job is closing that gap.
You may have tried (or wanted to try) getting your clients to keep a pain journal or calendar. These are great but they’re yet another thing you or your staff have to manage. And even when a client consistently uses a journal or calendar, you often end up with a messy pile of handwritten pages that no doctor or judge wants to read.
The available phone apps aren’t much better. Even if your client uses one, there’s no telling what information it will track or how you can get the information from the app in a format you can use.
I’ve been a disability attorney for 8 years and I designed ClaimData to make it as easy as possible for you to close the gap between your client’s medical records and their daily experience of limitation and impairment due to injury or illness. ClaimData is a symptom documentation and — more importantly — an impairment documentation software that will empower you and your clients to quantify the functional effects of their illness or injury. By doing this, ClaimData helps you tell your client’s story with actual data so you can get them the compensation they deserve.
I couldn’t find an app or software that met my specific needs so I designed ClaimData to help attorneys like myself and the clients we have the privilege to represent. If you can think of any way that ClaimData can better help you do this important work, please get in touch. Thank you for representing the sick and injured.