Panel Recap: The Mid-Year Checkpoint on Disability Firm Growth

In January 2026, Chronicle ran a panel asking what would work in the year ahead. About a hundred and fifty people registered, because that was the question everyone had in January. Eight months later, some of those answers held up. Others quietly stopped being true.

On Thursday, August 27, 2026, Chronicle brought three operators back to check the work. Nathan Chapman, president of Firmidable, on client acquisition. James Vancel, co-founder of Benny, on the claimant experience between the first click and a signed retainer. Nikhil Pai, founder of Chronicle, on case operations and AI. Will Yang, Chronicle’s Head of Growth, who leads the company’s events and community programs for the disability law space, moderated. The framing he set at the top held for the full hour: three vantage points on the same firm, not three pitches.

The most useful thread across all three segments was diagnostic rather than promotional. Nearly every growth problem a disability practice reports as a lead problem turns out, when someone actually looks, to be a conversion problem or a measurement problem. Nathan hears it from the marketing side. James sees it in application completion data. Nikhil sees it in case timelines. Three different vantage points arriving at the same conclusion is worth more than any one of them saying it alone.

You can catch the replay here:

Panelists:

• Nathan Chapman, President, Firmidable. More than 35 years in law firm marketing, and the first person in the country to bring professional marketing to Social Security disability. He hosts Firmidable’s webinar series for firm owners, Built to Grow.
• James Vancel, Co-Founder, Benny. Benny is a mobile-first platform for SSDI and SSI applications, where the claimant receives a link, completes the application on their phone, and it files electronically to SSA. Benny and Chronicle have been integrated since March 2026.
• Nikhil Pai, Founder, Chronicle. Chronicle is an ERE monitoring and analysis platform built for Social Security disability practices, monitoring more than 235,000 cases and 11.7 million SSA documents across 2,800+ disability professionals.

Moderated by Will Yang, Head of Growth, Chronicle. Will leads growth, events, and community at Chronicle, building educational resources and partnerships for disability law practices.

Key takeaways

1. The surprise of 2026 was paid, not organic. Everyone braced for AI to reshape SEO. It did. But the channel that improved most, in Nathan’s data, was pay-per-click, because of new conversion tracking rather than anything about search behavior.
2. “Leads are down” is usually false. In 2026 leads are almost always up, so a drop in intakes points at conversion. Nathan’s first move is not the ad spend, it is the recorded intake calls, where he consistently finds more voicemails and hang-ups than the owner believes are happening.
3. Intake is two conversations, and bundling them costs claimants. The relationship conversation and the information-gathering conversation want different energy. Firms that run them together lose people who were ready to sign.
4. Claimants finish applications on their own schedule. Roughly 30 percent of Benny applications are completed between 7pm and 7am, across two or three sessions rather than one call.
5. The national average describes none of your cases. SSA publishes a six-and-a-half to ten month range for time to hearing. That range dissolves the moment you look office by office.
6. Benchmarks are the prerequisite, not the reward. You cannot tell whether a new tool helped if you never measured what it replaced.

Leads are probably not your problem. It is often a conversion problem to be looking into. Who answers the phone, how fast the leads are getting called back, and how intake is trained.

Will Yang, Head of Growth, Chronicle

What actually changed in how claimants find a firm this year?

Everyone predicted claimants would use AI. That was the small half.

The prediction was right, and it landed faster than expected.

“I was just in a meeting yesterday, and one of the attorneys was saying that they’re continuously now getting advice, their claimants are asking AI how to win their case, and they’re sharing it with the attorneys,” Nathan said.

Anyone who has received one of those printouts across a conference table knows the feeling. But the bigger change is not that claimants went looking for AI. It is that Google brought AI to them whether they went looking or not.

“That AI overview on the Google page is really where most of the action is,” Nathan said. “That’s just shoving traditional searches down the page more.”

He added the detail that makes it concrete: most of those searches happen on a phone. On a phone, being shoved down the page means being shoved somewhere nobody scrolls.

The consequence nobody predicted

“What is surprising me more than that, more than people using AI for search, is what an impact it’s made on pay-per-click,” Nathan said. “So you remember pay-per-click? It’s been around forever, it doesn’t sound sexy, it’s a workhorse. But thanks to AI tools, and I’m going to mention one a few times today, particularly one called Enhanced Conversions for Leads, terrible name, we’re getting things like paid search to work infinitely better. We have been setting records all year, meeting after meeting.”

The counterintuitive read is worth sitting with. The channel everyone assumed AI would break is the one that got better, and it got better for an unglamorous reason: the tracking improved. Firms can now follow a paid lead through to signed retainer without anyone hand-keying a spreadsheet, which means the optimization finally has something real to optimize against.

What not to abandon

• Informational pages now get read before anyone reaches out. Your site has to anticipate those questions and become a trusted source. Nathan calls the discipline answer engine optimization, an add-on to SEO rather than a replacement.
• The map pack still matters. Claimants still want a disability lawyer near them, or believe they do.
• The classics still work, done differently. “I don’t think it’s necessarily that we abandon the classic things, but we do the classic things differently,” Nathan said. “You just need to add on to what you’re doing, but you don’t abandon the classic techniques either.”

What it changed on the demand side

Claimants arrive over-researched, “sometimes informed, sometimes misinformed about their case,” James said. They also arrive impatient.

“It’s also changed the pace at which claimants want responses.” Someone who gets a detailed, specific answer from a chatbot in four seconds expects something comparable from their advocate. That is hard to staff against, which is why James frames it as a tooling problem rather than a hiring one.

The question that replaced last January’s question

In January, firms asked how to get more leads. Now they ask which of the leads they already take were worth taking.

“More folks are working on initial and recon cases, which there’s much more visibility to now thanks to the SSA opening up those documents at the lower levels,” Nikhil said. “And so the question now starts to shift. Okay, I’m taking on more initial and recon leads, how do I actually measure the value of those leads? Are they winning at the rate that I expect?”

The number behind that question is large enough to change budgets. Win rates on initial and recon range from 25 percent to 65 percent depending on age and impairment, in Chronicle’s own data. A firm buying leads without knowing which cells of that range it wins in is buying blind and calling the result a marketing problem.

Why is “leads are down” almost always the wrong diagnosis?

This was the sharpest practical segment of the hour, and it starts with Nathan refusing the premise of his own business.

“I’m in the lead delivery business, but people don’t call me because they want leads, they want cases,” he said. “And so if they’re not signing them up, we’ve got to fix that.”

His diagnostic order

1. Are leads actually up or down? In 2026 they are almost always up.
2. If quality is the complaint, make it evidence. “This is a data-driven business, not an anecdote-driven business,” Nathan said. Document what was wrong with this specific lead, and that one, and send those. A general impression that quality dropped is not something anyone can act on.
3. Then look past the lead entirely. “Sometimes it’s not just the lead. Sometimes it’s the conversion, and sometimes it’s the intake team.”

Somebody has to actually listen to the calls

Every lead source, whether Google or television, should run through a dashboard that records calls. Nathan’s firm uses CallRail. The recording is the easy part.

“We find things like more go to voicemail and get hang-ups than you realize,” he said. “Answers not the way that you think your people are answering.”

The cheapest, best ROI you can get is to get more cases out of the marketing dollars you’re already spending.

Nathan Chapman, President, Firmidable

That line is the segment in one sentence, and it is why this is a conversion conversation rather than a budget conversation.

Where the conversions actually leak

James offered a structural explanation. There are two distinct conversations happening when someone starts a disability application:

• Do I like you? Do I want you to represent me, do I feel good about this relationship?
• How do I get the information in to move this forward?

When firms bundle them, claimants get overwhelmed by the work and stop attending to the question of whether they trust this advocate at all.

“The most effective firms we see completely separate the processes,” James said. A warm conversation establishing the relationship, then a clean handoff: here is the retainer, it is in your text and your email, here is the application, I need you to do it.

Why Nathan would not give you a benchmark

He declined to hand out a conversion rate number, and his reasoning is more useful than a number would have been.

Firms differ in what they take. “We know that some firms are more particular than others, and are going to turn down cases that other ones will make a living off of.” So the benchmark is internal: track leads by source, track what percentage you actually sign, then push against your own history.

He has watched firms run a signup contest for a month and watched the number jump, which tells you most of what you need to know about whether the ceiling was ever lead flow. “Set your own metrics, but the important part is that you do set the metrics, and that you pay attention to them.”

The answer that had nothing to do with software

Nathan has listened to a great many recorded intake calls. What surprises him is not technique.

“What surprises me is the lack of empathy by the people answering the phone,” he said. “I think they’re being trained on how to screen, and y’all are forgetting to train them that for the people calling, this is one of the lowest points in their life.”

He is not asking for long emotional calls. He wants the opposite: take control of the call, know what has to happen in it, and spend a few seconds establishing that the caller reached the right place. “It’s a learnable skill.”

Where do firms lose claimants between the first click and the signed retainer?

James spent this segment dismantling two assumptions that quietly shape most intake design.

Assumption one: claimants do not want to participate

“Your claimants are your co-counsel in a lot of ways,” he said. “They want to advocate for this, they want to get this right, they are happy to be involved in the process, provided they have clear guidance and clear direction on how to do so.”

The condition attached is not optional. They will complete a function report if they know someone is going to review it. What they will not do is fill out forms into a void.

His reframing is the line worth carrying out of the session: “claimants are willing participants and collaborators in this process, rather than the objects of the process.”

Assumption two: intake is an event

“Intake is much less of a single event. It’s an experience for people,” James said.

Most people complete an application across two or three sessions over a couple of days. They get partway through, they get tired, there is childcare, there are appointments. Firms that compress all of this into a single 60-minute call will get it done, but they will get rushed data and the bare minimum.

Which brings up the statistic that reframes the whole staffing question.

“We do see about 30 percent of our applications come in between 7pm and 7am,” James said. “That’s when people are free, that’s when they’re experiencing pain, that’s when they’re able to sit down and focus and do these things.”

Nearly a third of the work arrives when the office is closed. A process designed exclusively around business hours is designed around when the firm is available rather than when the claimant is.

The strategic version: fully developed case files

If claimant attention is the scarce resource, and attention is highest at the very beginning, then collect everything in that first window.

“Attention is the scarcest resource from your claimants,” James said. “The data is not that hard. It’s complicated, there’s a lot of fields to fill out, but really it’s about can you get their focus and their attention.”

Much of it can be inferred rather than asked:

• An SSI applicant who did not get the online app implies an 8001.
• An unsuccessful work attempt implies an 821 or an 820.
• Eligibility for DAC or widow’s benefits can be identified from what is already in the initial application.

All of it can be collected while the claimant is engaged, rather than requested in installments over the following twelve months, by which point motivation has fallen off sharply.

The operations version: an awareness problem, not a staffing one

The instinct when paperwork piles up is to hire. “We don’t think it is a staffing problem,” Nikhil said. “We actually think it’s more of an awareness problem.”

His argument turns on the shape of the work. An SSD case is lumpy. Heavy paperwork at the beginning, a quiet middle, then the full file review before the hearing.

Layer the mail on top and the week becomes unpredictable in a specific way: nothing to do, then five pieces of SSA mail at once, then a scramble. Often the scramble starts after a deadline has already passed, because the mail was slow.

“That means your team is always being reactive rather than proactive,” Nikhil said. The hidden cost is not the task itself but the context switching around it, pulled out of deep work to handle a form and a phone call.

His alternative is to move the same work earlier. “If you could understand what’s coming in the mail seven days in advance, what could you be doing differently? What could you be working on today that may take a couple of days, so now you have that breathing room rather than scrambling to hit a deadline?”

Where to start, in order

Nikhil laid out a sequence rather than a product:

1. Awareness first. You cannot fix what you cannot see, or measure without a baseline.
2. Manual processes and SOPs built on that awareness.
3. Automate the slowest, most expensive step. Then the next one.

In practice, he said, that is how the Chronicle and Benny integration tends to get adopted: firms notice they are drowning in questionnaires at the initial and recon level, and automate that specific step rather than everything at once.

What the connected version looks like end to end

The claimant completes the initial application in Benny. The 1696 is processed and the case appears in Chronicle. SSA requests a work history questionnaire or a function report, and Chronicle detects the request in the status report sheet and tells Benny it has been made.

From there the firm either already holds the information and submits to the ERE before the claimant’s mail arrives, or launches the form automatically off that signal and reviews it once it comes back.

“So it really makes it seamless, rather than someone having to notice that these things were requested, or you having to wait for the mail,” Nikhil said.

A live question from Shari Rabin tested the edges of this. What if the adjudicator is not assigned for three months and the function report information has changed?

James’s answer keeps the burden light: when the Chronicle notification arrives, re-request it as a review rather than a rewrite. “You’re reducing the burden to the applicant, and giving them the opportunity to re-engage if they want to, but not making it a requirement for you to move forward.”

What is the SSA doing in 2026, and what should firms benchmark against?

“Week to week it seems like there’s always something new that’s going to affect your processing and your timelines,” Nikhil said, citing district offices that had stopped accepting representative calls as of that same morning.

The number you should stop quoting

SSA publishes a range of six and a half to ten months to get a hearing held.

“Well, if you actually dive into that data, it really changes hearing office to hearing office,” Nikhil said. “So when you think about how you need to benchmark yourself, you shouldn’t really be looking at the national stats.”

The data to do better exists. SSA publishes region-by-region figures, and firms already know where their cases come from. What is missing is the arithmetic.

The payoff is not just a more accurate number. It is knowing whether a slow case is slow because of the agency or because of the firm. “That way you’re not hammering on your team to move faster when really there’s nothing they could be doing.” Firms working the same question from the hearing side may find our breakdown of ALJ approval rates a useful companion.

The portal most firms have not opened

AARPS, the Appeals and Appointed Representative Processing Services system gradually replacing ARS, carries data the ERE does not:

• Fee payment status, so you can see whether payments are being held up.
• Field office data, which matters because ERE coverage only begins at DDS.

“Look that up if you haven’t looked it up, it’s a different portal. You get a login if you are an appointed representative,” Nikhil said.

The consequence he flagged is the one to write down: “if the SSA gives a non-medical denial, that will only show up in AARPS and not in the ERE. It will never actually get to DDS and never into the ERE.”

The SSI escalation ladder

James picked up the same portal from the SSI side, where his team has spent the year fighting field offices booked into November or December for applications filed now, and appointments that may or may not happen on the schedule.

His team’s response is a sequence rather than a single fix:

1. Online, if they can get it. Only a few do.
2. Fax the 8001 in, signed, with the initial application and the wrap paperwork. This often initiates the claim and removes the need for the appointment entirely.
3. Mail it, signed, for field offices that reject faxes over e-signature concerns.
4. Schedule the phone appointment, as a last resort.

“There’s a sequence of, basically, can you get 80 percent throughput on each one, and then go to the next mechanism?” The target James set is 95 to 98 percent of SSI claims started, on the reasoning that SSI claimants are also the hardest population to reach by phone.

And AARPS is what makes the ladder auditable. “Having visibility on AARPS is actually the only way to see that with an SSI claim, because you can see if a Title II or a Title 16 claim has been initiated for an applicant, and then you can follow up on that.”

A search-side reading of the same delays

Nathan’s team is seeing a rise in people searching how long the process will take. Whether that reflects genuinely longer waits or simply less patience, he could not say.

Either way it is a content gap sitting in plain sight, alongside the question that has topped disability search volume for as long as anyone has measured it: how much money will I get?

Where has AI earned a seat, and where are expectations still ahead of reality?

Settled: medical chronologies

When Chronicle began, there were no medical chronology products at the price and quality a disability firm needed. That is no longer true.

“Chronologies are now a fairly standard practice to be generated by AI, whether folks are using ChatGPT or Claude, or using one of the bespoke tools like LexMed, or Superinsight, or DodoDetect,” Nikhil said.

His point about where the value comes from is one most firms have backwards. “It’s not always about accuracy, it’s about actually just taking the time to look through the entire file. With a 4,000-page file you could always have done that yourself, but chances are by page 2,000 you were tired, you weren’t looking at the same detail.”

The question is not whether the tool matches a perfect human reader. It is whether it beats a tired one on page 2,000. If you are still comparing options, our guide to choosing the right AI medical record platform works through the same tradeoff in more depth.

The frontier: brief writing

Vendors are moving up the value stack into work where strategy is involved, and firms have no way to evaluate the results.

Nikhil’s recommendation is concrete and unglamorous: build your own test set before you buy anything.

“Look at your own briefs, really understand what makes it good, starting from chronology. What makes my brief good, and what do I like? And then when you have a new vendor come to you saying, hey, I have this, can you actually run it through and see how it goes against your criteria?”

Why off-the-shelf tools miss

“Firms underestimate their unique style and approach,” James said.

A model trained on the most common cases will produce the most common output, which is a problem if your practice skews toward SSI, or younger claimants, or anything else that is not the center of the distribution. Benny’s own approach to function reports was to build a system that learns what a given firm accepts and rejects rather than imposing a house style.

Where the technology genuinely is not ready

Full case-management synthesis, an AI reading everything and telling you whether this is a good case and what is missing, is where people hope to get.

“One, it has a bunch of data risks and privacy things around that, which is risky, which is why people have been slow with it. But I think it’s also going to require a lot of firm calibration and orientation before you’re comfortable moving forward with it,” James said.

Nathan’s version of the expectations gap was the bluntest. What is genuinely delivering is scale of comprehension. What is not delivering is autonomy.

“We’re still not there in terms of it being self-automated. It takes the humans,” he said. “We’re still at the dawn of AI, and so hopefully we won’t all be out of a job in the future. But right now you really need smart humans running the smart tools to make it work.”

It is a point we have made before in a different register, and it has not stopped being true.

What should a firm put in place before 2027?

Will closed the panel section by asking each speaker for one operational investment to make before January.

Nikhil: benchmarks. Not one option among several, but the prerequisite. “If you don’t know what good is and what works today, how do you know if, when you’re adding another tool, things are getting better?” Compounding growth requires knowing a change was an improvement rather than a net negative, and across intake, brief writing, chronologies, and operational efficiency, most firms do not know. Our writeup on automation benchmarks for disability firms sets out what good tends to look like.

James: fully developed case files. He admitted he was repeating himself. Get everything you can while the claimant’s attention is high. “People are focused, people are intentional, people have high motivation when they’re starting their claim. That tapers very quickly.”

Nathan: capacity. “I run into so many firms where the biggest barrier to growth is not how do we get the leads and the cases, it’s doing the work.” Free people to focus on higher-level functions, because the opportunity is unusually large. “I’ve been doing this for 35 years, and I’m more excited today than I ever have been. But you’ve got to do the work, and you’ve got to do it well, if this is all going to work in the end.”

Lightning round: what happens in 2027?

Predictions

• Nikhil: win rate becomes a specific number rather than a feeling, measured by impairment and age against a firm’s own caseload. National statistics get abandoned in favor of state-by-state figures.
• James: more competition at the initial application stage and more applications overall, because information is easier to get. Expect a corresponding rise in dropout as people who applied quickly discover the process takes nine, twelve, eighteen, or twenty-four months.
• Nathan: more competition too, driven by higher fee caps and remote hearings. His silver lining for smaller practices: “AI likes boutique firms. In fact, I think there’s a little bias against the big firms, that maybe their quality is not there.”

What firms will stop doing

• Nikhil: quoting national rates.
• James: putting the burden of screening on applicants instead of getting them to a human quickly.
• Nathan: relying on your own website to establish your expertise. “AI understands that’s your website, that’s you complimenting yourself. So you need to quit relying on it to tell the world your expertise. You need to get out there and establish your expertise by becoming board-certified, or a guest on programs like this.”

One metric to bet on

• Nikhil: median days from denial to appeal, because it is a timeline the firm actually controls.
• James: a metric no disability firm currently tracks, something like monthly active users but for claimants. “How many of our claimants are we in regular touch with, at least once a quarter?” Firms doing more initial applications need those claimants to survive to a hearing, and most initial applications are denied.
• Nathan: Enhanced Conversions for Leads, and specifically connecting lead delivery directly to firm case management so nobody has to reconcile a list by hand.

Frequently Asked Questions

Our leads are up but our intakes are down. Where do we look first?

Start with the calls. Run every lead source through a dashboard that records calls, then have someone actually listen to a sample. Nathan’s experience is that more calls go to voicemail and get hung up on than firms realize, and that intake staff answer differently than owners assume. After that, check callback speed on form leads. Both are conversion problems, and both are cheaper to fix than buying more leads.

Is SEO still worth it now that AI overviews sit above the results?

Yes, but as part of a wider set. The AI overview pushes classic organic listings down the page, which is significant on mobile. Nathan’s position is that you add answer engine optimization on top of SEO rather than replacing it, because good SEO is largely good answer engine optimization already. The local map pack still matters. What has changed most is the case for digital ads, which he says are working better than they have in years.

Should we collect the information for SSA forms, or complete the forms?

James recommends completing them. Completing a form does not require submitting it directly to SSA. The value is that the information sits in your case file, so when SSA requests it you can respond immediately rather than going back to the claimant. If time has passed and details may have changed, send it back as a quick review rather than a fresh request.

How much of intake can we realistically expect claimants to do themselves?

More than most firms assume, on two conditions. Claimants need clear guidance on what to do, and they need to know a human will review the result. Under those conditions James finds them willing collaborators. What does not work is handing someone a form with no direction and no confirmation that anyone will look at it.

Why do so many applications get completed overnight?

Because that is when claimants are free and focused. Roughly 30 percent of Benny applications are completed between 7pm and 7am, and most people work through them across two or three sessions rather than one sitting. A process that only accommodates business hours is built around the firm’s availability rather than the claimant’s.

What should we benchmark hearing wait times against?

Your own hearing offices, not the national range. SSA’s published six-and-a-half to ten month figure varies enormously office by office, and SSA publishes the regional data. Doing that arithmetic tells you whether a slow case reflects the agency or your own process, which is the difference between a staffing conversation and a patience conversation.

What is AARPS and do we need it?

AARPS is the Appeals and Appointed Representative Processing Services system, which SSA is gradually rolling out to replace ARS. Appointed representatives can get a login. It carries fee payment status and field office data, which the ERE does not, because ERE coverage begins at DDS. The practical consequence is that a non-medical denial issued at the field office appears in AARPS and never appears in the ERE at all.

How do we evaluate an AI tool that claims to write briefs?

Build a test set from your own work first. Pull briefs you consider good, articulate what makes them good, and use that as the standard you run a vendor’s output against. Without it, you are evaluating on impression. This matters more for brief writing than it did for chronologies, because brief writing involves strategy and firms differ far more in strategy than in how they want records summarized.

Does this advice change for a solo or small firm?

The tracking problems intensify, because time is scarcer. James notes that solos usually stay in touch with clients well, since there are fewer of them, but spend disproportionate time working out where a given case stands. Nikhil adds a caution about benchmarking at small volumes: fewer cases means noisier data, so situational awareness of where each case sits is a better first investment than statistical analysis.

What is a realistic budget split across marketing, intake, and operations?

Nathan cited Vista Consulting, a Baton Rouge operational consultancy, for a marketing rule of thumb: aim for a 5x return, which implies putting roughly 20 percent of revenue back into growth. James declined to give overall benchmarks but offered a direction of travel instead. Time skews toward operations and intake, money skews toward marketing, and cost to serve a client should be falling year over year. If it is not, he reads that as under-deployed technology. Nikhil added cases per case manager as a third number worth watching.

Watch the full replay

Upcoming events

• Winning Mental Health (and Other) SSD/SSI Claims with Maryjean Ellis. Function reports, third party function reports, and work history reports done right. Wednesday, September 9 · 12:00 PM CT · Register
• Chronicle Unlocked | Permissions 201. Giving the right people the right access without opening your whole caseload. Thursday, September 17 · 11:00 AM CT · Register
• Disability Peers in Practice (September). The monthly practitioner roundtable, run in two time slots. Tuesday, September 22 · 12:00 PM CT and 2:00 PM CT · Register
• 35 Years of Disability Firm Marketing: What (Really) Works with Nathan Chapman. The full version of the segment he opened this panel with. Wednesday, September 23 · 12:00 PM CT · Register

About this series

Advancing Technology in Disability Law is Chronicle’s session series on what is actually changing in disability practice: the processes, the tools, and the operational decisions behind them. This panel was the mid-year follow-up to the January 2026 edition, which asked what would work in the year ahead.

Chronicle builds software for this practice area and for the community around it, and those are not separate projects. The practitioners who solve these problems well have usually done it without anyone outside their office knowing, and these sessions exist to put that work in front of people who can use it. Alongside this series we run Chronicle Unlocked, on getting more out of the platform itself, and Disability Peers in Practice, a monthly roundtable where practitioners compare approaches directly.

Every session is free, and the full schedule lives on the Chronicle events calendar. Recaps like this one are published here afterward. You can also follow Chronicle on LinkedIn for session announcements.

To see how Chronicle handles ERE monitoring, SSA document workflows, and integrations with the systems your team already uses, you can book a demo. Questions about anything in this recap go to support@chroniclelegal.com or 847-665-9612.

Full session transcript

Welcome and framing

Will Yang: Welcome, everybody, to the Mid-Year Checkpoint: What’s Working in Disability Firm Growth Right Now. This is a continuation of a panel series that we started in January around advancing technology in disability law. Around that time we had many questions answered, but now it’s been eight months, and so it’s a good time to check in, pause, see what’s working, see what’s changed, as well as what has stayed the same. That’s what we’re going to do with today’s panel, featuring guests from the team over at Benny, as well as Firmidable, as well as Chronicle.

In case this is your first event with us, a heads up: this is not a one off. Chronicle regularly runs free virtual sessions for disability practitioners, a few every single month. This is our first main series, Advancing Technology in Disability Law, where we talk about what’s changing in the practice in terms of process, new tools, and operational things. We also have a Chronicle Unlocked series, where we talk about how to use Chronicle’s platform more adeptly than your typical beginner to intermediate level. And we have Peers in Practice, which we run monthly. That’s an opportunity for you to connect with peers like yourself, to talk shop and recreate the old water cooler that’s been a little harder to create in a virtual capacity. If you want to check out any of our sessions you can find them on our website, or go on YouTube and search for the recaps, since some folks have found it that way.

At a high level, we’re going to run the panel for roughly 45 minutes with 15 minutes for Q&A. There are three vantage points, talking from the lens of marketing, claimant intake, and case operations. All three of the speakers today have experience talking with hundreds of firms about these different challenges. If you have any questions along the way, put two hashtags in front of your question and it makes it easier to stand out in the Zoom chat so that we can get to it. We’re going to try to field those in real time, when we’re in the section, as opposed to at the very end. We will also have a recording of this afterwards, so if you want a replay or a summary of any of the key points from today, you can get that. Stay tuned until the end, because we have a takeaway sheet for all the key points the speakers share today.

Meet the panel

Will Yang: For a quick round of introductions, we will be hearing from Nathan Chapman, who is the president of Firmidable. He’s been doing law firm marketing for more than 35 years. He was the first person in the country to bring professional marketing to disability work, when this practice area essentially didn’t market at all, and he’s won many professional awards since that time. He regularly provides programming for the disability space, so be sure to check out his series. We were just on it last month, in case you want to learn about how to scale and grow a disability firm, which I know some folks mentioned in the Zoom chat.

We’re also joined by James from the Benny team. He built Benny to be a mobile-first platform for SSDI and SSI applications, helping disability advocates scale their caseload without adding staffing. One of the things that has always stood out in our interactions and collaborations with Benny is that roughly 90 percent of claimants who get invited from their platform actually complete the application. They’re seeing much higher completion rates, and about 40 percent finish within the same day, with the rest trickling in over the course of a week. He has a data set that nobody else in this practice area has. One of the points he’ll share later is how more than 30 percent of those applications get completed between the hours of 7pm and 7am, which is to say, when your office is closed.

Lastly, we have Nikhil, who is the founder of Chronicle. Chronicle is an ERE monitoring and analysis platform that helps disability firms automate their case tracking, ERE monitoring, and document workflows. We’re monitoring more than 235,000 cases and more than 11.7 million SSA documents, and serving over 2,800 disability professionals.

By the end of this session you’re going to leave with an understanding of which of your 2026 assumptions have potentially gone stale, so what’s actually changing in how claimants find or choose a firm this year. We’re also going to learn about where you might be losing claimants, the gap between when people say they need help and a signed retainer. Where AI has earned a permanent seat at the table for your firm, and where it has not. And the one operational investment you should make before January of next year, as well as some predictions for 2027.

Before we get started, I’d love to hear from you in the Zoom chat. Where do you feel your growth engine is most inefficient right now? A, getting qualified cases in the door. B, converting the leads that you already get into signed retainers. C, applications or function reports and chasing claimants for paperwork. D, case prep, evidence development, and reacting to SSA deadlines. Or E, all of the above. Type your letter in the chat and we’ll come back to this at the end.

I see some folks looking to get leads, all of the above. I also see applications, function reports, chasing claimants for paperwork, some case prep and evidence development.

Theme 1: Client acquisition in an AI-mediated world

Will Yang: What we’re going to first explore is client acquisition. I’m curious about what folks have been seeing change in terms of the ways people are finding and choosing a firm. Nathan, maybe you can kick us off there.

Nathan Chapman: We predicted, as I guess most of the world did, that people were going to turn more and more to AI for their searches. It’s been surprising how quickly. I was just in a meeting yesterday, and one of the attorneys was saying that they’re continuously now getting advice, their claimants are asking AI how to win their case, and they’re sharing it with the attorneys. So I can only imagine how much you enjoy getting those kinds of AI reports to help you do your job.

But what is surprising me more than that, more than people using AI for search, is what an impact it’s made on pay-per-click. So you remember pay-per-click? It’s been around forever, it doesn’t sound sexy, it’s a workhorse. But thanks to AI tools, and I’m going to mention one a few times today, particularly one called Enhanced Conversions for Leads, terrible name, we’re getting things like paid search to work infinitely better. We have been setting records all year, meeting after meeting. It’s like, well, we just broke another record. And just think about it, AI is just getting started. No telling where we’ll be in a few years.

Will Yang: What do you have to say about this topic, James?

James Vancel: Similar to Nathan. We’re all using AI in our firms and to improve our practices, but claimants are also using AI. As Nathan mentioned, people are coming with a lot more information, sometimes informed, sometimes misinformed about their case. But I think it’s also changed the pace at which claimants want responses, and the very personalized feedback on their case and how they want to be responding to it. We’re seeing a lot higher needs of that. People are used to it. They have a very specific question, they can ask a chatbot, and they’re getting a very detailed response on what’s going on. They’re wanting to expect the same thing from their advocates in terms of a very personalized response of what’s outstanding, what do I need to do, how can I make this better? And that’s often hard to respond to from a pure staffing perspective, so building tooling around that.

We’re also seeing more and more claimants are happier to get involved in their case. That was a big question mark people had when they started using Benny: how much should we be involving the claimants in this? And we’ve actually been pretty pleasantly surprised with the progression of that, from the initial app all the way through to all the necessary paperwork and medical record requests that you need to get to a final decision in your initial app. I think that’s going to continue. The last one is I do think we’re seeing more people play at the initial app level. There’s just more and more advocacy at that level, which is also changing the landscape.

Nikhil Pai: Definitely to build on that, from the Chronicle perspective, we’re not playing as much at the lead level. We usually work post-DDS. However, as James was mentioning, more folks are working on initial and recon cases, which there’s much more visibility to now thanks to the SSA opening up those documents at the lower levels. And so the question now starts to shift. Okay, I’m taking on more initial and recon leads, how do I actually measure the value of those leads? Are they winning at the rate that I expect?

We’ve looked at our own data and we see a range based on age and impairment. The win rate on initial and recon can range from 25 percent to 65 percent. So it really depends what the quality of leads you’re getting in is, not just in terms of will they pick up the phone and answer, but are they the right mix to make sure you’re hitting the numbers you want and the ROI you want on that ad spend.

Will Yang: One of the things that is coming up more and more across the board is AI summaries. My understanding, Nathan, is that you’ve done a lot of extensive work on this side of things in terms of what claimants are potentially seeing before they even reach a firm’s website. What does that mean for the channels a disability firm may have historically relied on, and where they should be budgeting nowadays?

Nathan Chapman: I don’t think it’s necessarily that we abandon the classic things, but we do the classic things differently. Not wildly differently, but somewhat differently. We definitely see a lot of informational pages just being looked at before people convert to reaching out. So you want to be anticipating on your website what those questions are, so that you become a trusted source for them. We call this answer engine optimization. It’s an add-on to SEO, search engine optimization.

But interestingly and happily for you, if you were Wikipedia these days you’d be in big trouble, right? You’re not just providing information. Ultimately, they need a service. So things like “find a lawyer near me” and appearing in that map pack, that’s still really important. That’s classic Google, classic SEO. You just need to add on to what you’re doing, but you don’t abandon the classic techniques either.

Will Yang: Is there anything you have seen in terms of what firms are still spending on this year that has either stopped or slowed down in its efficacy, and what should they be doing in terms of allocating their budget on the acquisition side?

Nathan Chapman: Most people, by the way, in AI, ChatGPT is really important for ordinary people, but that AI overview on the Google page is really where most of the action is. That’s just shoving traditional searches down the page more. So it’s obviously still worth doing, and in fact worth appearing in those AI answers, but I think it makes the digital ads all the more important. And by the way, I’m on a desktop today, but most of your searches are on smartphones, so when stuff starts getting shoved down the screen, it can be really far down there. So I think we’re shifting more money to the digital ads.

Will Yang: For the broader panel, when a firm says that intakes are down this year, what do you look at first to figure out whether it’s a market problem, a channel problem, or an intake problem for that firm?

Nathan Chapman: I’m happy to go, because we spend a lot of time on that. I’m in the lead delivery business, but people don’t call me because they want leads, they want cases. And so if they’re not signing them up, we’ve got to fix that.

We look at everything. Are leads up or down? If you say they’re up but I don’t think they’re any good, then what I encourage you to do is you need to be specific. This is a data-driven business, not an anecdote-driven business. It’s like, oh, we’re having these impressions, and people are telling us more. You really just need to document what was wrong with this lead, what was wrong with this one, and send that specific one where we can dig in deeper.

But then the other part of the equation is sometimes it’s not just the lead. Sometimes it’s the conversion, and sometimes it’s the intake team. All of your lead program, whether it’s through Google or even television, which is still a thing, it ought to run through a dashboard. We use one called CallRail that records the calls, and then somebody has got to check on them. They say, listen, for quality assurance. We need to do that quality assurance part, and we find things like more go to voicemail and get hang-ups than you realize. Answers not the way that you think your people are answering. We just need to keep checking on the quality. The cheapest, best ROI you can get is to get more cases out of the marketing dollars you’re already spending.

James Vancel: Maybe to add to that, I can’t speak as much to the market side of it and the channels, but one thing we do see is there are two distinct conversations that people are having when they’re starting a disability application. Do I like you, do I want you to represent me, do I feel good about this relationship? And how do I get the information in to move this forward? And I think when those get bundled you potentially lose claimants. They get overwhelmed with the work that has to happen, and they’re less focused on do I really believe in this advocate, and that they’re going to do right by me?

The most effective firms we see completely separate the processes. There is a very warm glow conversation of, I want to work with this firm, they seem like they know what they’re doing, they made me feel good, they understand me. There’s some information to collect, obviously, to make sure it’s a good case. But that’s really a warm glow conversation. And then the ability to immediately action on this is what I need from you. Great. Second, you’re happy, here’s the retainer, it’s in your text, it’s in your email, great, we’re sending you the application, I need you to do it.

We also see, and one of the trends we’re going to talk about, is actually trying to get the fully developed case file in that initial intake process. Not only the initial app, but any of the supplementary forms, the work history report, function report, SSI application, medical records requests, anything that you’re going to need. That’s when they’re focused. They’re in pain, they’re frustrated, they’ve said, today I’m going to figure this out, and they want to complete it. And that’s where you move from not only a happy, converted lead, but actually a completed lead, where you have everything you need to get to an initial decision.

Will Yang: Nathan, you were mentioning conversion rate is an area that you’re looking at. What are some ballpark benchmarks that might be useful for firms to keep in mind, as well as, in general, your experience of what is okay, good, better, best in that situation?

Nathan Chapman: I like the way you phrased that, in that the firm sets it for themselves. We know that some firms are more particular than others, and are going to turn down cases that other ones will make a living off of. So that becomes for yourself. But I do think it’s worth tracking. I mentioned a while ago being data-driven. We can track the number of leads from all of the sources and see what percentage you are actually signing up, and then push yourself, push your team. I have actually seen firms have a contest, and what do you know, all of a sudden that month the number of signups goes way up. So set your own metrics, but the important part is that you do set the metrics, and that you pay attention to them.

Theme 2: The claimant experience, from first click to signed retainer

Will Yang: As we wrap up this first section on AI discovery and the claimant acquisition side of things, we can transition into the claimant experience, from the first point that they click to a signed retainer. I’m curious for folks on the panel to walk us through what today’s claimant expects between the point where they’re saying “I need help” to “I have a lawyer,” and where do you find most firms lose them in the process?

Nathan Chapman: A while ago I mentioned recording the calls and listening to them. I have listened to a lot of calls, and what surprises me is the lack of empathy by the people answering the phone. I think they’re being trained on how to screen, and y’all are forgetting to train them that for the people calling, this is one of the lowest points in their life. Just a little empathy will go a long way.

I don’t mean you need the caller crying on your shoulder and eating up time. In fact, I think you need to proactively take control of the call. You know what needs to happen in that call. But just a few words of saying, we go through this all the time with people, you’ve come to the right place, whatever it is. Do that level of training also. It’s a learnable skill.

Will Yang: This was one of the areas Benny made a bet on when it came to building a mobile-first SSDI and SSI application. James, can you share what you’ve learned about claimant behavior that most firms are still designing their intake around incorrectly?

James Vancel: Two things we see as potentially wrong assumptions going in. One is your claimants are your co-counsel in a lot of ways. They want to advocate for this, they want to get this right, they are happy to be involved in the process, provided they have clear guidance and clear direction on how to do so, and they’re able to do so effectively.

A lot of people were worried, my claimants won’t do this, they don’t want to, they just want us to do it for them. I think that’s true, they want guidance, they want advice, they want to be able to do it easily, but they’re very happy to engage in the process, provided they know it’s adding value to their case. They’re very happy to get guided on how to complete the function report, provided they know you’re going to check it and make sure it’s good. But that’s the involvement they want. So claimants want to be involved in the process, and they can do so very well, and they can free up a lot of your staff time, and they’re going to do it better anyway, because they know their case a lot more. They need you to review it, they obviously need you to identify some of the major mistakes and fix those before they get submitted. But claimants are willing participants and collaborators in this process, rather than the objects of the process.

The second is that intake is much less of a single event. It’s an experience for people. They want to do it as fast as possible, but what we see is most people are doing it over two to three sessions over a couple of days. They get somewhere, they get tired, they have childcare, they have other appointments, they have family needs. It’s very hard to schedule into a 60-minute phone call. Many do, many can, and many are willing to do so. But you’re going to get pretty rushed data, and you’re going to get what you need and the bare minimum. Versus, as Will said at the beginning, we do see about 30 percent of our applications come in between 7pm and 7am. That’s when people are free, that’s when they’re experiencing pain, that’s when they’re able to sit down and focus and do these things. So creating that flexibility for them, we think, adds a lot of potential to get a lot more in, but also to free up a bunch of your time to focus on the things that are much more legal, are much more difficult, and require a lot more time and thought.

Will Yang: When it comes to the application, the paperwork burden, the function reports, the follow-ups, that was one of the pain points folks mentioned in the Zoom chat earlier. For a growing firm, what does it actually look like when the burden is systematized rather than being staffed as a solution? Nikhil, maybe you can lead off.

Nikhil Pai: We’ve talked about this quite a bit at Chronicle. We don’t think it is a staffing problem. The traditional solution is just hire more heads, we have more paperwork, we need more people in seats going through it all. We actually think it’s more of an awareness problem.

When you think about an SSD case and its lifecycle, it’s very lumpy. You have a lot of paperwork at the beginning, then some before the hearing, and then right before the hearing you have to go through the whole file review. There are a lot of dead points in any case over time, but also when you think about it through the week, where maybe someone’s sitting and there’s not much to do, and then suddenly the next morning five pieces of mail come in from the SSA and you have to scramble to work on it. Or more common, because we all know the USPS tends to be quite late or missing, you end up in a scramble where a deadline has passed, or a client calls in, and suddenly your team is scrambling. That means your team is always being reactive rather than proactive, whether it’s to a questionnaire, a hearing acknowledgement form, anything like that. You have to hit these deadlines and you end up caught scrambling.

There’s a lot of time lost, especially with context switching, where maybe you were working on something that was deep work and then suddenly you have to deal with a client call and helping them with a form. This really adds up over time. So for us the burden isn’t just add more people, it’s how do you actually systematize these processes through awareness? If you could understand what’s coming in the mail seven days in advance, what could you be doing differently? What could you be working on today that may take a couple of days, so now you have that breathing room rather than scrambling to hit a deadline?

Will Yang: Tactically speaking, since all three of you have perspectives on how to build different parts of the system for disability firms, what has that looked like from a timeline standpoint of realistic expectation setting? If someone’s at the earlier stage of building their system, or maybe they’re already at a base V1 and looking to go to V2, what do those evolutions look like?

Nikhil Pai: At least for us, when we think about the iteration cycles of building these systems, it usually starts with awareness. You can’t solve the problem if you don’t have the data. You can’t measure if you don’t have a benchmark, like Nathan was saying. So it really comes down to first starting with a foundation of awareness, and then of course you will have manual processes built on top of that to start with. You take that foundation of knowing when things are coming in, start setting up some SOPs, and have your folks jump around and work on all of those.

That’s where we usually then see people say, okay, what is the process that takes the most time? What is the slowest or most inefficient? And start adding automated systems on top of that. That’s where, with Chronicle, we see people implement Chronicle and they start saying, at the initial and recon level we’re getting all these questionnaires, let’s leverage something like Benny. We integrate with Benny so that we can start sending out some of that stuff automatically. So it really comes as, understand the problem, get your awareness, start measuring through manual processes, and then individually work on each of those with automated systems, tackling them one by one.

Will Yang: James, Nathan, anything to share on the phases of systemization you see across firms?

James Vancel: The main thing I’ll say here is a lot of firms start by operationalizing or automating one of the pieces, and then it’s slowly about building how much can you do in that. Attention is the scarcest resource from your claimants. The data is not that hard. It’s complicated, there’s a lot of fields to fill out, but really it’s about can you get their focus and their attention, and technology allows that to be much more flexible and much easier.

Most of what we see is firms start with, okay, let me just do initial apps, let me just do function reports in a more automated way. But eventually the evolution is, how do I do everything with this one interaction I have with the claimant? So I’m going to do their initial app, I’m going to get their work activity report, I’m going to get their other things that come thereafter, I’m going to send them the notes of, these are the medical providers you had, go request them to send their medical records in.

Just how do you basically capture that full attention while you have it, because claimants get exhausted, and it’s much more taxing. We see most of the staff time is actually figuring out where someone is in the process, and where they’re stuck, and what’s going on. And you can’t solve for all that, because a lot of it is on the SSA side and what data you have visibility on or don’t. But you can predict all the things that we are going to need for this application, and do them while you have the claimant’s attention, and try to build out that full process. Fully developed case files is sort of where we want to see everyone go, and making sure that that is done in that one discrete interaction you have with them when they’re most focused and paying most attention to their claim.

Will Yang: Nathan, do you want to wrap us up on this question?

Nathan Chapman: I’m going to defer to the others. We are mostly externally focused, getting you the leads. I don’t spend as much time on the inside, other than we wave the red flag if we’re not seeing the conversions that we need. And I do think systems are very important.

Will Yang: To wrap up this section, what changes for firms when intake, applications, and case monitoring are actually connected as opposed to living in separate silos? James, to your point about that all-in-one discrete interaction, what have you heard from overlapping Chronicle and Benny customers since the integration launched earlier this year?

James Vancel: There was one question in the chat of, do you collect the information or complete the forms? We generally recommend complete the forms. That doesn’t necessarily mean you submit them directly to SSA, and that’s where a lot of the Chronicle integration comes in. We generally recommend collecting everything up front, and then you have it in your case file, you don’t need to go request it from the claimant. But thereafter, when Chronicle will ping you that it’s been requested by SSA, you can communicate to the claimant, we already got this, we’re good to go, we’re taking care of it, and you can immediately upload it. Which reduces these processing times, but also ensures that claimants are often getting that, and I’m sure you guys have all experienced this, they get it, it says the deadline was yesterday, and they just got it in the mail, and they freak out, they call you, they’re like, I’m so worried, I’ve missed the deadline. But the reality is we can get ahead of a lot of those things.

There are a lot of things also you can be inferring from the initial application. They’re applying for SSI, and they didn’t get the online app. Okay, we need to fax in an 8001, potentially mail it in. We know if they had an unsuccessful work attempt, they’re probably going to get an 821 or an 820. A lot of these things can be inferred from what is in the initial application, and can be collected at that point in time too. Should they apply for DAC? Should they apply for widow’s benefits? A lot of these things are what we’ve been working on, to just try to get that fully developed case file for every possible benefit for the applicant when you have their attention.

Nikhil Pai: And just to illustrate the flow on what is automatable today, you can imagine they fill out the initial application with Benny, you get into the system, the 1696 is processed, it then shows up in Chronicle. The SSA starts sending out their additional supplemental forms, like the work history questionnaire or the function report. Chronicle detects that, because they actually put it in the status report sheet. And then we tell Benny, hey, these things have been requested. And through the Benny integration, either you already have all the information you need and submit it to the ERE before the client even gets that piece of mail, and that way you can contact the client and say, we got this. Or you can launch the form automatically from that ping, and then review it once the client has completed it. So it really makes it seamless, rather than someone having to notice that these things were requested, or you having to wait for the mail. It’s automatic, and it’s being handled for you.

Will Yang: I want to make sure we cover Shari’s question before we move on to the next thread, which is, what happens if the adjudicator isn’t assigned for three months and the function report information changes? Do we do a more simple update?

James Vancel: A lot of times what we’ll see firms do, if they do that at the initial application, is when the Chronicle ping comes they’ll re-request it and just say, hey, you already filled this out, do you want to just review it, make sure it’s updated, is there any changes you want to make? Sometimes things can change, we agree with that. Sometimes you get one after recon. You filed one at initial app, same thing. But you’re reducing the burden to the applicant, and giving them the opportunity to re-engage if they want to, but not making it a requirement for you to move forward, and you getting a case closed because you didn’t complete the necessary information for SSA.

Theme 3: Operations and AI, from pilot to production

Will Yang: The next third I want to shift gears to is operations and AI, especially on the topic of how you go from a pilot of an AI solution to actual production. To kick us off, what are you all seeing from the SSA this year, whether it’s process times, hearing offices, the ERE, or field operations? What should firms be expecting for the remaining part of this year, and how should they build around the patterns that have emerged?

Nikhil Pai: I feel like we’re all still dealing with the fallout from DOGE and all the changes at the SSA over the last couple of years. Even in the last Peers in Practice session we ran, just that morning I believe the district offices had stopped accepting calls from representatives, and that was a whole large mess. So week to week it seems like there’s always something new that’s going to affect your processing and your timelines.

They publish stats. They say it takes six and a half months to ten months to get a hearing held. Well, if you actually dive into that data, it really changes hearing office to hearing office. So when you think about how you need to benchmark yourself, you shouldn’t really be looking at the national stats. You probably deal with different regions, or you’re a national firm, but depending on what lead sources you’re getting clients from, different points in different parts of the country, you really have to dial in your metrics based on this region-by-region data that the SSA does offer. But you have to actually do the math to figure it out.

I think we’re seeing a lot of folks scratching their heads, being like, this used to take less time, what is happening? They have the data available if you just code your data to actually understand which office and which benchmark you can look at. You can get more precise timelines and understand, are you actually doing well? Is it the SSA side? Is it your staff side? That way you’re not hammering on your team to move faster when really there’s nothing they could be doing.

The other thing we’re also seeing is they’re adding more data. They are making more data available to each firm. AARPS was a great development in the last couple of months to a year, I think, is when they launched it, and that includes additional information like fee payments. So you can actually see where your payments are, are they being held up. And an additional thing they have there is field office data. The ERE is only DDS and onwards. AARPS, look that up if you haven’t looked it up, it’s a different portal. You get a login if you are an appointed representative. That actually shows you field office data, so you can look at that and see which cases have been assigned at the field office, and what’s happening at the field office before it even hits DDS. Which means if the SSA gives a non-medical denial, that will only show up in AARPS and not in the ERE. It will never actually get to DDS and never into the ERE. So you should check out AARPS for some of that data.

James Vancel: The biggest headache we’ve been smashing our head against is SSI claims, which I’m sure everyone has experience with. Setting up appointments, very difficult. Long delays. Some field offices are booked out until November or December for applications that are coming in now. It’s also unclear if they’re actually going to complete the call on the date that it’s scheduled, or if your claimant’s going to respond to that call.

So we’ve been trying to build a somewhat airtight defense mechanism against that, that we’re still piloting but we’re hoping to roll out soon, where we obviously collect the information for the 8001, being able to fax that in with the initial application, with your wrap paperwork, that often initiates the claim and gets rid of the need for the call. Sometimes some field offices don’t take fax because they don’t like an e-signature on a fax, even though an e-signature is valid, so you can mail it at that point.

There’s a sequence of, basically, can you get 80 percent throughput on each one, and then go to the next mechanism? And having visibility on AARPS is actually the only way to see that with an SSI claim, because you can see if a Title II or a Title 16 claim has been initiated for an applicant, and then you can follow up on that. So having visibility on that, and then automatically executing these mitigating steps, to basically not give Social Security any reason to not initiate this. The first step is they get it online, only a few get that. Next step is fax it in, signed. Next step is mail it in, signed. Last resort is schedule a phone appointment for people. But trying to get to at least 95 to 98 percent of SSI claims started is really what we’ve been trying to focus on, because these are often the hardest people to get in touch with as well. So figuring out how to coordinate and schedule things. I’m hopeful SSA will change some of these, and ideally make an online SSI app, but it seems like that’s not the highest priority for them.

Nathan Chapman: Hey Will, this is almost a side note, but just based on what they were saying it kind of inspired me. We’re seeing a rise in people searching for topics around how long will the process take, for me to get my benefits, possibly either showing a reflection of longer wait times, or maybe increasing impatience, I don’t know. But it’s even more so. And of course, always the classic is, how much money will I get? You can never beat that in terms of content that people are searching for.

Will Yang: That’s a great point on how to be thinking about the marketing side there. In our January panel, one of the things we talked about when we talked about AI was AI’s value being something around speed to insight, and not necessarily strategy. We’re now a little over the halfway point of the year, where AI seems to be really cementing its place in disability practices. Where are you seeing AI most adopted, and where are expectations still outpacing the reality of where AI is right now?

Nikhil Pai: Back when we started Chronicle, there were no medical chronology products available at the price point and quality disability firms needed, and that’s really changed quite a bit. Chronologies are now a fairly standard practice to be generated by AI, whether folks are using ChatGPT or Claude, or using one of the bespoke tools like LexMed, or Superinsight, or DodoDetect.

The key thing to always remember, of where the value is here, is it’s not always about accuracy, it’s about actually just taking the time to look through the entire file. With a 4,000-page file you could always have done that yourself, but chances are by page 2,000 you were tired, you weren’t looking at the same detail. That’s where AI is really good at actually being comprehensive and grabbing every data point out there that you may have missed. So that’s something to always remember. It’s not always about, is it catching every single thing that I would have, but at least is it more comprehensive, and I can take my eye to strategy and actually look over that.

Where things are moving now, and where I think we’re going to see if expectations are outpacing reality, is we’ve now seen, look, we have chronologies, they’re pretty solid now. AI companies are moving into the brief writing side of things. You may have seen LexMed’s ChartVision product, or the five-step process from Superinsight. They’re trying to move up the value stack into these places where more strategy is involved.

What I recommend firms do is they actually have to start developing their own evaluation framework, so they can really continue to iterate with these products and understand, are they good or not? If you don’t have a good test set, you’re going to buy some AI product and you want to see if it’s good, you have to have a good test set of data. Look at your own briefs, really understand what makes it good, starting from chronology. What makes my brief good, and what do I like? And then when you have a new vendor come to you saying, hey, I have this, can you actually run it through and see how it goes against your criteria? So really just making sure you have these benchmarks to yourself as you evaluate new products as they move into the brief writing side of things.

James Vancel: Building on that, I think firms underestimate their unique style and approach, and I think that’s one of the downsides of leveraging standard off-the-shelf AI tools. That’s one thing we thought very deeply about when we did our function report functionality. We thought about making this a very iterative learning agent that would learn what people accepted and didn’t accept in terms of our suggestions, and basically updated that. Every firm has their own approach, and every firm has their own style of how they do this. And I think that’s really important to respect.

When you’re using this, you might get things that are going to be more general, and might work for the most common cases that are going to be what the data is trained on, but you may specialize in a very different area. You may do a lot more SSI, you may do a lot more younger claims. Whatever your profile is, is really important to think about.

There’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit on the current implementation of AI, which is reducing mundane tasks and synthesis. One we’ve seen that we hope to build at some point, or work with someone who builds, is basically initial denials, how we’re reviewing DDEs and how that’s informing recons and requests for hearings, which are often just, hey, get new information. But how can you actually ensure that the right information is going into this next review to change the decision? Whereas a lot of times we’re just completing the paperwork as simply as possible.

Where people are hopeful they’ll get to, and I think we’re still a ways away, is if you can connect your entire case management suite to it, and it gives you a full synthesis of, is this a good case, what things are missing, that sort of overall integration. One, it has a bunch of data risks and privacy things around that, which is risky, which is why people have been slow with it. But I think it’s also going to require a lot of firm calibration and orientation before you’re comfortable moving forward with it.

Nathan Chapman: In terms of the expectations versus the reality, where it is delivering is the ability now to just be able to absorb epic amounts of data, more than any human could ever do before. I mentioned pay-per-click a few times. Even other things like Meta, we’re getting new life in things like Meta, Facebook and Instagram. But where the expectation is greater than the reality is, we’re still not there in terms of it being self-automated. It takes the humans. We’re still at the dawn of AI, and so hopefully we won’t all be out of a job in the future. But right now you really need smart humans running the smart tools to make it work.

Will Yang: As we wrap up this section, the last question is, what is one operational investment a firm should make before the start of 2027, if they’re thinking about how to continue to compound their growth instead of compounding into a more chaotic situation within their operations?

Nikhil Pai: This is interesting, since it’s a lot of what we’re talking about between all the sections, which is you need benchmarks. If you don’t know what good is and what works today, how do you know if, when you’re adding another tool, things are getting better? If you want to compound growth, you need to know that you actually made an improvement, not a net negative. And so if you don’t have benchmarks across your intake, your brief writing, your medical chronologies, your operational efficiency, it makes it really hard to grow and change as quickly as this industry is moving, if you just don’t know what’s happening. So I would say benchmarks.

James Vancel: I’m a bit of a broken record, but fully developed case files at that initial touchpoint. Getting everything you can when you have the claimant’s attention, rather than spreading it out piecemeal over the course of the first 12 months of the claim. People are focused, people are intentional, people have high motivation when they’re starting their claim. That tapers very quickly. So figuring that out as much as possible.

Nathan Chapman: I’m going to actually suggest that people work with companies like Chronicle and Benny and work on increasing the capacity of their teams. I run into so many firms where the biggest barrier to growth is not how do we get the leads and the cases, it’s doing the work. So let’s let the people focus on the higher-level functions, so you can take advantage of that opportunity. As you mentioned at the beginning of this, I’ve been doing this for 35 years, and I’m more excited today than I ever have been. But you’ve got to do the work, and you’ve got to do it well, if this is all going to work in the end.

Lightning round: predictions for 2027

Will Yang: Let’s wrap up with the lightning round. The first question is, what is one prediction that you have for 2027 for disability firms?

Nikhil Pai: As I mentioned, more and more data is available, and AI makes it even easier to pull out. So I think when folks start thinking about their win rate, it’s not going to just be, did I win this case that I think was strong? They’re actually going to be able to say, by impairment and by age, with my caseload today, I hit my benchmark win rate. So just being very specific on their benchmarks with all this new accessible data. And what they’re going to stop doing is being nationwide with their statistics. I really think state by state will be the benchmark they use.

James Vancel: I expect us to see continued increasing competition at the initial app stage. There’s probably going to be a lot more people applying, given it’s easier to get information on whether you’re applying. I think we’re probably going to see also higher dropout rates from applicants, because people are going to come, they get very quick information, they apply, they don’t realize it’s going to take 9, 12, 18, 24 months. So I do think we’re going to get a higher influx of initial applications and more competition, especially if the Recon Act passes, because there’s going to be faster time to hearing. But we could see higher dropout rates that are going to result if we’re not engaging our clients.

Nathan Chapman: I think my prediction is we’re going to have more competition, thanks to the higher fee caps and the remote hearings. I see more and more firms getting into Social Security disability, and we’re going to be up against the big boys. But the good news is, AI likes boutique firms. In fact, I think there’s a little bias against the big firms, that maybe their quality is not there. So if you really master AI optimization, there’s a real opportunity for the small firms. But you’ve got to know what you’re doing, and you’ve got to do it right.

Will Yang: The next lightning round question is, what do you think is something that firms will stop doing this year?

Nikhil Pai: I guess I jumped the gun a little bit there, which is they’re going to stop quoting national rates. It’s going to be state by state. They’re not going to try to lump everything together.

James Vancel: I hope firms are going to stop putting all of the burden of screening on applicants, and try to focus more of those initial conversations on the warm glow, and getting faster time to talking to a human, and feeling a positive reception with their firm.

Nathan Chapman: Maybe I’ll go with this, because we’re not big into chasing the new shiny thing, we’re into doing the classic things better. But I’ll do this. AI wants you to be an expert, and people are used to just saying, oh, I’ll do my website, I’ll tell everybody I’m an expert. But AI understands that’s your website, that’s you complimenting yourself. So you need to quit relying on it to tell the world your expertise. You need to get out there and establish your expertise by becoming board-certified, or a guest on programs like this. It can’t be all about your website anymore.

Will Yang: Doing multi-channel. Excellent. And then the last lightning round question, what is one tool, habit, or metric that you would bet on for the next 12 months?

Nikhil Pai: The metric I would bet on is the median days from denial to appeal. So roughly how long from getting a denial do you actually get that appeal in? When I think about getting that awareness seven days in advance, Chronicle gives you additional days. And what Benny and James are talking about, where you have the full records, so you can cut down a lot of that information gathering you need to do when you appeal, will really start cutting things out. So I think people are going to work really closely at their appeal timeline, since that’s something they can control, and the faster they do that, the faster things move.

James Vancel: One thing we hope more people will be betting on and monitoring is, I’ve talked a lot about getting everything up front in terms of the hard work. Thereafter, it’s engaging with your claimants regularly, just with updates, giving them access and visibility. I almost wish disability firms had a monthly active user kind of metric of, how much are we in touch with our users? Even that’s just sending them an update, like, hey, everything’s on track, you’re good to go. Or, things are going on.

Case status has done some great things of giving users visibility, but it’s a crazy process in disability where you have more visibility than the actual applicant, and we need ways to share that and keep claimants involved. That is going to increase your likelihood of moving. If you’re doing more initial apps, you need to get them to hearings, because most are going to get denied. So how do you keep them engaged through that? I don’t think anyone tracks that, but I think that would be a really interesting metric that more and more people have. How many of our claimants are we in regular touch with, at least once a quarter?

Nathan Chapman: I’m going to bet on that thing with the terrible name, Enhanced Conversions for Leads, the AI tool to help digital ads work better. In the past we could give you a list. Here’s the 300 leads we sent you last month, can you tell us which ones you signed up? And no firm would ever take the time to do that. To be honest, we didn’t really have the time to type it all in. They gave us the list. But now it’s connecting. Ultimately we’re just starting to get our system connected to your case management software. We don’t have to ask you. We’re going to follow the lead all the way through and say, okay, these are the ones they signed up and which ones we didn’t. That’s going to be a really exciting moment when we get everybody signed up for that.

Key takeaways and Q&A

Will Yang: We’re going to wrap up with a couple of key takeaways, and then open up for Q&A.

Three things to take away from today. The first is that leads are probably not your problem. As Nathan mentioned, it’s often a conversion problem to be looking into. Who answers the phone, how fast the leads are getting called back, and how intake is trained.

Also, intake is not necessarily a singular event. As James emphasized, this takes a couple of different sessions over a few days, and so something to take away is that more than 30 percent of Benny applications are being completed between the hours when your office is closed. That’s something to think about when you consider the operational setup of your flows.

And the national average describes none of your cases. As Nikhil mentioned, getting more refined on your win rates and the different benchmarks for your firm becomes increasingly important.

I put into the Zoom chat, if you want the key takeaways of what folks shared today, you just fill out the feedback form, and then you’ll get a link to the takeaways, in case you wanted to share it with somebody at your firm, or just review anything we went over today.

With that, we’re going to open up to questions. One of the questions Mark had earlier is, Nathan, what would you suggest for lead follow-up?

Nathan Chapman: We do a lot of referrals to a company called LawRuler, and they have a really nice lead chasing automation. It goes into there, and they just keep getting pinged over and over. Hey, you said you wanted to talk, call us back, call us back, until they opt out. And we’ll see people months later, long after your humans would have given up, they’ll finally reach back out to you. So it helps with your conversion.

Will Yang: I’m curious, how does this advice change for a solo or a small firm versus a larger firm?

James Vancel: I think all the time suck and tracking things are just amplified, because your time is even more valuable and more scarce. Figuring out where someone is is even much harder. A lot of stuff on staying in contact and communication with your clients is probably less important, because you’re probably doing that reasonably well. But figuring out where someone is in the process, what needs to happen, getting them on the phone is probably a much bigger distraction, given you need to also be attending hearings and representing people in administrative court.

Nikhil Pai: With a small firm you have less data, obviously, you have fewer cases, so it’s hard to benchmark as well, because you’ll have a lot more noise in your data depending on how you pick your cases. So I would focus mainly on the situational awareness aspect of it, of can you know where each case is at any point in time, because you’re probably still overworked and trying to just stay on top of things.

Will Yang: My other question, to round it out, is what is a realistic budget split in terms of marketing, intake, and operations for a growing firm? Whether that’s thinking about it in the context of time, or money?

Nathan Chapman: I’ll give him credit, because I’m about to take his statistic. There’s a company called Vista Consulting, based in Baton Rouge. They’re an operational consulting company for law firms, and it was started by a CPA, so he’s very data-driven. His advice is that in terms of marketing budgets there ought to be a 5-time return, which means you look at your revenue, and about 20 percent you ought to plow into future growth through marketing, and that’s how you get your 5-time return.

James Vancel: I don’t know about overall benchmarks, but I do know the trend is that time is obviously skewed towards the operations and the intake, and money is skewed towards the marketing. I think both are hopefully going to go down. I could see marketing going up if it gets more competitive, but I do think the cost on intake and operations should continue to go down, and that should be a good metric you’re tracking. What is your actual cost to serve clients? That should continue to go down. If not, I would say you’re not deploying as much technology as you could be. I don’t know on marketing, if things get more competitive, ads get more expensive, but that’s more Nathan’s world. But I do think a golden metric would be that time and money should be going down on these, and it should be the minority of money at this stage.

Nikhil Pai: Another way to think about it is we’ve also seen people look at number of cases per case manager, and that does get affected by marketing as well, given if the cases are easy to win you don’t need as many people. So that’s another good metric to look at, across the entire stack.

Will Yang: With that, we are at the top of the hour. Thank you so much to our panelists today for speaking on these three different themes, as well as sharing their predictions for 2027. As a reminder, replays and follow-ups will be sent in just a little bit. Thanks for your time today, and we hope to see you in a future session. Thanks, everybody.

Nikhil Pai: Thanks, everyone.