Not all injured vets have obvious scars; school law clinics are taking on pro bono cases for those who don’t have the visible markings of battle and have a hard time getting their disability compensation.
It is sad but true that many of our nation’s veterans are injured in battle. Sadder still is that without visible signs of a disability, some of those soldiers are unable to receive their due compensation.
Dustin Allison was in Iraq in 2007 when an explosion caused shrapnel to fracture his skull and take off a piece of his ear, destroying the radio behind his head in the process.
“I was definitely lucky,” said Allison, a former Utah State Trooper from the Salt Lake City suburbs who had volunteered for duty in Iraq.
Since the incident, he cannot run without being sick and experiences vertigo, but these things are difficult to prove.
“If you lose your leg it’s pretty clear what happened, whereas if you get hit in the head and you get migraines and dizzy and vertigo and all kinds of more subjective things that happen, that makes it harder” to diagnose, said Allison. Because of government safeguards against fraud, this means that there is a lot of paperwork involved with the Veterans Administration’s (VA) benefits claims process.
In 2008, he decided to attend business and law school at the College of William and Mary. He was introduced to the school’s veterans benefits legal clinic that it was starting and became one of the clinic’s first clients.
The clinic uses law students and a faculty member to tackle complex cases on a pro bono basis in which veterans can have difficulty providing the evidence they need to substantiate their claims. Veterans receive disability compensation for injuries and illness incurred or aggravated during their active military service. The amount of the compensation is based on a rating assigned by the VA.
The VA, unfortunately, is extremely backlogged. Nearly 570,000 pending claims, which is two-thirds of all pending claims, have been untouched for more than 125 days.
“We want to respect our veterans, but when you’ve got people waiting, often times in excess of a year to get their claims processed, that’s not a good sign,” said U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va). “This is a national embarrassment.”
Between 2009 and August 2012, the clinic helped 46 clients with 343 claims of injuries and illnesses. The cases often involve post-traumatic stress disorder either from warfare or a sexual assault that there may be no record of. In one case, a World War II veteran who injured his knee in basic training in 1943 didn’t report a claim until 1971; the claim was repeatedly denied until the clinic stepped in.
“At 50 clients you’re directly representing at a time, that’s certainly not going to impact the backlog in a way that it needs to be. But if you get more law schools across the country to do this work then you’re exponentially leveraging the passion and the experience of law students across the country to help with that backlog,” said Patty Roberts, director of clinical programs at William & Mary’s law school.
Over 30 law schools around the country are using a playbook created by the school to start similar legal clinics specifically for veterans.
Some lawmakers have introduced a bill to fund these clinics so that they can take on more clients, though school officials say that they can’t pinpoint an exact cost because they use existing space and faculty. In the meantime, the schools fundraise to pay for things like psychological assessments ad travel to the homeless shelters where many veterans reside.
“These clinics don’t require that much of an investment, but they do require some,” said Stacey-Rae Simcox, a managing attorney at the William and Mary’s Puller Veterans Benefits Clinic. And even that little bit of money combined with the extensive time needed for the claims make it difficult for veterans to handle on their own.
“It’s truly impossible to do it well by yourself,” said Allison, whose claims took about two years to resolve. “If you don’t provide the evidence, they’re going to deny you. If you don’t know what you need to provide or what that standard of proof is on your own, you need support somehow.”
Photo: thejointstaff/Flickr
