Most disability firms already have access to the data they need. The SSA posts decisions, schedules hearings, records fee payments, and logs consultative exam appointments in portals that are available to every appointed representative. The question is not whether your firm has access to this data. The question is whether your workflow is surfacing it proactively, or leaving you to discover it after the fact.
On June 11, 2026, Chronicle hosted the second session of The Disability Firm Playbook, a workshop series that addresses one specific operational challenge per session with takeaways firms can act on the same week. This session covered all three SSA portals: ERE (Electronic Records Express / BSO / ARS), AARPS (Appeals and Appointed Representative Processing Services), and AROS (Appointed Representative Online Services). Chronicle founder Nikhil Pai walked through each portal live, showed the workflow most firms use today, demonstrated a set of AI-powered tools for improving that workflow without switching anything, and then showed how Chronicle automates the whole picture.
The attendance poll told the story before a slide was shown. When asked how much time their team spends across SSA portals each week, most attendees answered 3 to 5 hours or more than 5 hours. Nobody reported spending less than an hour. The data is there. The time being spent to find it is the problem.
You can catch the full replay here:
Speakers:
- Will Yang, Head of Growth at Chronicle, moderated the session and managed live Q&A
- Nikhil Pai, Founder of Chronicle, delivered the full portal walkthrough, demo, and Q&A responses
Key Takeaways
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Reactive firms check when they have time. Proactive firms get notified when something changes. The ERE has always had the data. The failure is not a data problem, it is a routing and timing problem. If your workflow depends on someone remembering to check, or on mail arriving on time, you are already behind.
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The ERE status report spreadsheets contain more than most firms realize. The initial and recon spreadsheet, in particular, includes columns for CE appointments, claimant information requests, and questionnaire status, but you have to scroll past the on-screen view and click “Download Spreadsheet” to get them. Most firms never do.
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AI tools can transform ERE spreadsheet data without any case-level PHI. The status report spreadsheets do not contain medical records. They can be safely dropped into any AI chatbot (consumer or enterprise) to extract events, identify outstanding questionnaires, compare two reports for what changed, and build a caseload overview. The four prompts shown in this session are available for free at chroniclelegal.com/playbook.
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AARPS is the most underrated workflow in disability law. Most firms have never set it up. It shows fee payment history and case assignment details, including non-medical denials that never appear in the ERE. The main barrier is login.gov, which links to personal government accounts and creates a credential-sharing problem. Chronicle stores login.gov credentials securely and notifies firms daily of new fee payments.
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AROS is coming in Q4 2026. The SSA is developing a new portal to replace both ERE and AARPS. The MVP will have a subset of the current data, which means there will be a transition period where firms need to check three portals simultaneously. Chronicle is tracking development and plans to aggregate all three sources.
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The core insight is architectural, not tactical. Whether you use AI prompts, Chronicle, or better manual discipline, the shift from reactive to proactive is not about working harder. It is about building a system where changes reach you instead of waiting for you to find them.
What Is the ERE and How Should Disability Firms Use It?
The ERE (Electronic Records Express) is the SSA’s primary portal for appointed representatives. In practice, the name “ERE” refers to an entire suite that includes ERE (document submission), BSO (Business Services Online, the authentication layer), and ARS (Appointed Representative Services, the eFolder access layer). Industry convention uses “ERE” as shorthand for all of it.
The ERE contains two categories of information. First, the status reports: three downloadable spreadsheets (one for hearing-level cases, one for appeals, and one for initial and reconsideration cases) that show case status, decision dates, hearing schedules, CE appointments, questionnaires, and medical evidence requests across your entire caseload. Second, the e-file: the actual case documents and exhibits for each individual client, accessible by entering the client’s social security number.
Nikhil walked through both in the live demo. The status reports are where most firms spend their time. The e-file is where many firms miss information entirely.
What Most Firms Are Actually Doing in the ERE
The standard pattern: download the hearing and appeals spreadsheets once a week or so, filter for recent decisions, and manually build a to-do list from there. Then open the e-file for individual cases on some schedule, typically once when a hearing gets scheduled, again a week before the hearing, and once more the day before.
This workflow misses two things systematically. First, the initial and recon spreadsheet. It has been available in the ERE for two years, but many firms have never used it. It contains far more detail than the hearing spreadsheet, closure dates, FQR quality review flags, and columns for CE appointments and pending questionnaires. But it is not directly downloadable from the primary list view. You have to scroll past the case grid and click a separate “Download Spreadsheet” link at the bottom of the page. Most firms either do not know this step exists or skip it for time.
Second, the e-file. Most firms open the e-file close to hearings. But for initial and reconsideration cases, the SSA is now including DDE (Disability Determination Explanation) documents in the e-file at the time a case closes, effectively putting the decision in a document you can access before the mail arrives. About 80% of the time, the DDE is uploaded on the same date the case closes. The remaining 20% can take up to four weeks. Firms that check the e-file proactively can file appeals weeks faster than those waiting for the mail.
As Nikhil put it during the live demo: the standard pattern treats the ERE as a lookup tool. Proactive firms treat it as a data source that should be feeding their workflow automatically.
The story that opened the presentation put the stakes plainly. Will Viner, a Chronicle customer, shared the situation that drove him to change his workflow:
We would receive calls from our clients telling us they’d been approved or denied. That doesn’t look very good professionally.
The ERE had that information before the mail and before the client got the letter. The firm’s workflow just was not reaching it in time.
How to Filter ERE Status Reports for Decisions and CEs
For hearing-level cases: open the hearing spreadsheet, sort by status date (which corresponds to the decision date), and filter the Title II Decision and Title XVI Decision columns for entries that are not empty. Remove favorable decisions from the filter to isolate unfavorable ones. The result is a ranked list of recent decisions to evaluate for appeals.
For CE appointments in initial and recon cases: download the full initial and recon spreadsheet using the Download Spreadsheet button at the bottom of the list view. Open the file in Excel. Use Find (Ctrl+F) and search for “Scheduled.” This highlights every cell containing a scheduled CE across the CE Appointment columns at the far right of each row, CE Appointment 1, 2, 3, up to 5 or 6 columns per case.
The initial and recon spreadsheet is, as Nikhil acknowledged during the demo, “super messy.” There’s a lot of information in there, and it’s really hard to find where those CEs are. The Find workaround is the fastest path to what you need without building a more systematic process around it.
For firms managing hundreds of cases, the manual process works, but it requires consistent discipline, produces no audit trail, and does not scale with headcount. It also cannot alert you to changes between check-ins. That is where AI tools and Chronicle step in.
What Can AI Tools Do With ERE Status Reports?
The four prompts Chronicle built for this session are designed to take ERE spreadsheet data and organize it into something actionable without requiring any case-level PHI to leave your system. The status report spreadsheets contain case-level administrative data, status dates, claim types, questionnaire flags, CE appointment dates, but not medical records. They are safe to drop into consumer AI tools without a BAA.
The prompts are available at chroniclelegal.com/playbook. They work in Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI tool with file upload capability.
Prompt 1: Events. Extracts all hearings, CE appointments, and scheduled events from the status report spreadsheets. Outputs a clean table with each CE’s start time, end time, time zone, status, and location. From there, you can ask follow-up questions in the same chat: which CEs are canceled? Which hearing offices have the most cases? The AI can also generate an iCal file you can import directly into your calendar, a point-in-time snapshot that at least gives you the scheduled events in a usable format.
Prompt 2: Outstanding Questionnaires. Scans the initial and recon spreadsheet for open questionnaires, work history questionnaires, function reports, and similar requests. Outputs a table of clients with outstanding items so you can proactively follow up before a deadline passes silently.
Prompt 3: What Changed. Requires two reports: one from the previous session and one from today. The AI compares them and produces a diff, what status changed, what decisions were issued, how many cases dropped off the report. Then you can query the diff: what decisions are favorable? Which cases have new questionnaires? This is the closest the manual workflow gets to “what happened since I last looked” without building automated monitoring.
Prompt 4: Active Caseload by Status. Drop in all three status reports and get a summary of where your caseload stands, how many cases at each stage, what’s pending, what’s active. More useful for operations visibility than for urgent workflow triage, but useful for firm owners who want a weekly snapshot without building a dashboard from scratch.
Nikhil demonstrated all four live during the session. The key AI behavior he highlighted: once the data is structured by the initial prompt, you can ask conversational follow-up questions in the same thread. You do not have to re-upload the file or re-run the prompt. The session was using Claude for the demo, but Nikhil also showed the questionnaire prompt running in ChatGPT, confirming it works across AI systems.
On the question of context windows, whether large spreadsheets would cause AI tools to hallucinate, Nikhil addressed this directly during Q&A. Spreadsheets are structured data. AI tools handle them differently from long-form documents: rather than reading every row into the model’s context, they parse the file using code, which allows them to handle much larger files accurately. A 3,000-case firm can safely upload their full status reports and expect reliable extraction. The prompts are also designed to progressively reduce the data scope, making each follow-up question more focused and less likely to produce unreliable output.
For firms who want more from the AI workflow than these four prompts, Nikhil encouraged experimentation: “Start asking questions. It will either hit a wall, or it will give you something that you’ll be surprised by.” Common extensions include requesting pie charts of caseload by status, drafting CE reminder emails for each client on the extracted list, or connecting AI tools directly to case management systems to pre-populate follow-up tasks.
The ERE documents feature page covers how Chronicle handles this same data layer, useful context if you want to understand what automated monitoring looks like compared to the manual and AI-assisted approaches shown here.
What Is AARPS and Why Do Most Disability Firms Not Use It?
AARPS (Appeals and Appointed Representative Processing Services) is a newer SSA portal that most firms either do not know about or have decided is too much trouble to set up. According to Nikhil’s estimate during the session, roughly 50% of disability representatives have never created an AARPS account despite having had access to it for approximately a year or two.
The data gap AARPS fills is significant. The ERE does not show fee payments at all, and it does not show cases that were denied at the field office level for non-medical reasons, those cases never make it into the ERE’s ARS system. AARPS contains both of these.
Fee payment history. AARPS shows which claimants have had fee payments issued, when, under which program (SSI or SSDI), and the amount. This is not the same as the Notice of Award, AARPS does not include the full context of how the payment was calculated or whether it is a partial payment. But it does give firms visibility into incoming revenue before the formal notice arrives. For firms managing hundreds of cases, knowing which fee payments have been issued and tracking them systematically is a genuine business operations improvement.
Case assignment details. AARPS shows cases at the field office level, earlier in the process than the ERE, which only captures cases once they move to DDS. This includes non-medical denials: cases that were denied for technical reasons (income, resources, age, or other non-medical eligibility factors) before they ever reached a medical review. These cases simply do not appear in the ERE. If you are looking for them and not finding them, AARPS is where they are.
Setting Up AARPS: The login.gov Requirement
The setup friction is real. Creating an AARPS account requires a login.gov account, a federated identity system that the federal government uses across multiple agencies. The person creating the account must verify their identity using a real ID or driver’s license (or passport book), enter their social security number, and match their phone number. That login.gov account must then have the same SSN and contact information as their ERE account, otherwise the connection will not work.
The more significant issue is what login.gov connects to. Because login.gov is a hub account for federal services, it links to your personal SSA account, your VA account, your TSA PreCheck account, and any SBA accounts you have, in addition to AARPS. Sharing login.gov credentials with staff is not the same as sharing ERE credentials. It is sharing access to every personal federal account tied to that identity.
This is why large firms historically have not used AARPS. The standard workaround, have the attorney or owner log in manually each day to retrieve fee payment data, adds workload instead of removing it.
Chronicle’s solution is to store the login.gov credentials in an encrypted form, use them to retrieve AARPS data on a daily basis, and present only the relevant fee payment and case data to the appropriate team members. Only users with manager, admin, or billing owner roles can view fee payment data within Chronicle, staff members cannot. The firm’s login.gov credentials are never exposed to the team.
The setup: go to Profile in Chronicle, then AARPS, enter your login.gov username and password and complete the OTP code setup. Agree to terms of service, save, and optionally enable fee payment notifications. After that, Chronicle checks for new fee payments daily and notifies the appropriate users when they appear.
As Nikhil framed it: “You need to get paid, and so if you know the money coming in the door, you can better invest in your business. From a business perspective, AARPS is definitely the most interesting” workflow improvement available to firms that have not already addressed it.
For context on why firms lose visibility into cases and what that costs operationally, Why Clients Know About Decisions Before You Do covers the dynamics that AARPS partially addresses.
What Is AROS and What Should Disability Firms Expect?
AROS, Appointed Representative Online Services, is the SSA’s next-generation portal, intended to replace both ERE and AARPS in a single interface. If you were at NOSSCR’s conference in Baltimore in 2026, you may have heard the SSA mention it. Chronicle’s information about AROS comes from conference sessions and ongoing monitoring.
The current status: AROS is in a limited pilot with a small number of firms. As of this session, even Nikhil has not had direct access to it. The SSA’s stated goal is to launch an MVP in Q4 2026.
The MVP will have a subset of the current portal features, meaning it will not immediately replicate everything in ERE and AARPS. The practical implication for most firms: when AROS launches, they will temporarily need to manage three portals rather than two, at least during the transition period before AROS reaches feature parity.
AROS will use login.gov for authentication, same as AARPS. The SSA plans to allow firms to add accounts for case managers and paralegals, but the specifics of that multi-user setup are not yet confirmed.
One notable detail from the session: “We recently learned that the SSA is trying to model a little bit off of Chronicle,” Nikhil shared. The implication is that AROS may incorporate some of the monitoring and alerting concepts that Chronicle has built, though almost certainly in a more basic form and with the access limitations inherent to a government portal.
Chronicle’s plan for AROS: monitor development closely, and integrate AROS data into the Chronicle dashboard when it becomes available, so firms do not have to manage an additional login and manual check. The goal, as Nikhil put it, is for Chronicle to remain “your hub for all of this data” regardless of how many portals the SSA operates.
For reference, ERE Down? What to Do When SSA’s Portal Fails covers the fragility of manual portal dependency, which the multi-portal transition period will amplify.
How Does Chronicle Automate ERE, AARPS, and AROS Workflows?
The Chronicle workflow replaces manual checking with automated monitoring and notification routing. The full picture across all three portals:
ERE Monitoring
Chronicle checks the ERE status reports every 2 hours. Every 2 hours, the system downloads the latest status data across all monitored cases and identifies what changed since the previous check. Chronicle also opens the e-file every single day for every single monitored case. This catches document-level changes, new CEs, new questionnaires, new evidence, decisions posted in the e-file at the initial and recon level, without requiring anyone on your team to log in.
The dashboard surfaces changes in several views: upcoming hearings and recently scheduled cases; decisions from initial through Appeals Council; a recent documents section that functions as a virtual mailbox showing every new document across the firm’s e-files; and status reports showing ERE access on new clients coming in.
For initial and recon cases specifically, Chronicle goes one step further. When a case closes at the initial or recon level, Chronicle opens the e-file, locates the DDE document if it has been uploaded, and extracts the decision outcome. This gives firms early awareness of decisions that have not yet arrived by mail, useful because, as Nikhil noted, about 80% of DDEs are uploaded on the same day the case closes.
The notification system is where most of the operational value lives. Chronicle’s notifications can be configured per case (turn on decision and event notifications for specific clients you are actively working) or per stage (turn on notifications for all hearing-level decisions, or all initial-level CEs, without having to claim each case individually). Notifications arrive by email, and each email links directly to the relevant case and document in Chronicle.
Nikhil’s recommended approach for managing the notification inbox:
- Create a dedicated email label or folder for Chronicle notifications so they don’t dilute your internal communications
- Use that folder as a task list: do not archive an email until the action has been completed
- Turn on document notifications for cases where you want access to the underlying files, not just the event alert
For larger firms, Chronicle administrators can claim cases and configure notifications on behalf of team members, useful when assigning caseloads alphabetically, by stage, or by case manager.
AARPS Integration
Chronicle’s AARPS integration is currently in beta, focused on fee payment tracking. After entering your login.gov credentials in Chronicle’s profile settings (encrypted, not visible to staff), Chronicle checks for new fee payments daily. New payments generate notifications to users with manager-level or above access. The fee payment data is also visible in a dedicated section under Decisions in the Chronicle dashboard.
This solves the credential-sharing problem that has kept large firms from using AARPS at all. The attorney or firm owner enters the login.gov credentials once. From that point, the team can view fee payment data in Chronicle without ever seeing or using the actual login.gov account.
AROS Tracking
No integration yet, AROS is not live for general use. Chronicle is monitoring development and plans to integrate when AROS data becomes accessible. The goal is for the AROS transition to be invisible to firms using Chronicle: the data appears in the existing dashboard without requiring new logins, new manual checks, or new training.
Case Management System Sync
Chronicle integrates with Clio, Filevine, Litify, MyCase, Zapier, Dib Case, and Wings. For supported CMS platforms, Chronicle pushes status changes and (for Clio, Filevine, and Litify) documents directly into the case management system, eliminating the manual data entry step of transferring information from ERE spreadsheets into the CMS.
Prevail does not have an API and is not supported for automated sync. Many firms run Chronicle alongside Prevail and handle data transfer manually or not at all, depending on workflow preference. NIOS integration is currently in beta testing. Smart Advocate and Law Ruler are next in the integration pipeline.
For a deeper look at the ERE monitoring layer and what it means for case-level operations, How Disability Firms Never Miss a CE Appointment Again covers the CE tracking workflow in detail, and Going Paperless with SSA addresses the broader shift away from mail-driven workflows.
What’s New in Chronicle
Nikhil used the final section of the presentation to cover recent releases:
LexMed integration (now live). LexMed provides AI-generated pre-hearing briefs, chart reviews, and medical chronologies. The integration is live, and the first chronology is free. Nikhil described the quality as “very high fidelity” with great feedback from firms that have used it. The integration is available in Chronicle’s integrations settings.
Updated interface. A redesigned case details view launched the same week as this session, focused on cleaning up the visual layout and modernizing the feel. The previous activity history section was temporarily removed during the update, Nikhil confirmed it would return as a “case feed” section by the following Monday.
More user roles. Chronicle added granular access controls for managing what different team members can see and do. Admins can now configure per-user permissions for viewing reports, assigning cases, adding SSNs, and requesting chronologies. These controls are in the role settings on each user profile and in the Account settings.
Client portal coming. A client communication system is in development. More details at the Summer Launch event on June 16.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I see decisions in the ERE status report at all case levels?
Only for hearing-level and appeals-level cases. At those stages, the status report spreadsheet includes columns for Title II and Title XVI decisions. For initial and reconsideration cases, the decision is not in the status report. It is in the e-file as a DDE document, but only after the SSA uploads it, which happens at the time of case closure about 80% of the time. The other 20% can take up to four weeks. Chronicle checks the e-file daily and extracts the DDE when it appears.
Does Chronicle work with login.gov for AARPS, or can I use ID.me?
Chronicle only supports login.gov for the AARPS integration. ID.me accounts are not supported. However, AARPS allows you to have both simultaneously, you can maintain an ID.me account for other purposes and a login.gov account specifically for AARPS and Chronicle. The two credentials do not conflict.
How large of a spreadsheet can I safely upload to an AI chatbot?
For structured spreadsheet data like ERE status reports, AI tools handle large files better than long-form text because they can parse the file using code rather than holding every row in active memory. A firm with 3,000 active cases can safely upload their full status report spreadsheets and expect reliable extraction. The four Chronicle prompts are also designed to progressively reduce the data scope, the initial extraction step produces a smaller, cleaner dataset that makes follow-up questions more accurate.
Does Chronicle integrate with Prevail?
No. Prevail was built without API access, which makes automated integration technically impossible. Many firms use Chronicle alongside Prevail and manage the data transfer manually. For firms that are actively evaluating CMS options, Chronicle integrates with Clio, Filevine, Litify, MyCase, Zapier, Dib Case, and Wings. NIOS is in beta. Smart Advocate and Law Ruler are next.
When will AROS be available, and will it replace the need for ERE and AARPS?
The SSA’s stated timeline is a Q4 2026 MVP launch. The initial AROS release will have a subset of the current ERE and AARPS features, so there will be a transition period where firms need to manage all three portals. AROS will also require login.gov authentication. Chronicle is tracking development and plans to integrate AROS data when it becomes accessible to representatives.
How does Chronicle notify me about fee payments from AARPS?
Once you connect your login.gov credentials in Chronicle’s profile settings (under the AARPS section), Chronicle checks for new fee payments daily. When a new payment appears, notifications go to any user with manager, admin, or billing owner access. Staff-level users do not see fee payment data. You can also turn on email notifications specifically for fee payments, similar to the decision and event notification system Chronicle uses for ERE monitoring.
Watch the Full Replay
Upcoming Events
Chronicle Summer Launch: Everything New in H1 2026 + What’s Next June 16, 2026
Chronicle’s summer launch event will recap every integration, feature, and workflow change released in the first half of 2026, and preview what’s coming next. The session will include a first look at upcoming features, including the client portal and client communication system Nikhil mentioned at the end of this workshop.
Register here, all registrants receive the recording, so you’ll get the recap even if you cannot attend live.
About This Series
The Disability Firm Playbook is Chronicle’s operational education series for Social Security disability firms. Each session covers one specific challenge, spotting at-risk cases, managing SSA portals, evaluating technology, with a live demo and a specific workflow you can implement the same week.
Session 1 covered spotting at-risk cases before they escalate. You can read the full recap at The Disability Firm Playbook: Spotting At-Risk Cases Before They Escalate.
This was Session 2. Future sessions will be announced at chroniclelegal.com and through Chronicle’s events calendar.
If you want to see how Chronicle handles ERE monitoring, AARPS fee tracking, and document alerts for your specific firm setup, Book a Demo with the team. The walkthrough is 20 minutes and is tailored to your current tools, caseload size, and case stages.
For additional context on the specific problems these workflows address:
- What Happens When You Miss an SSA Deadline, the downstream consequences of reactive monitoring
- The 10 KPIs Every Disability Firm Owner Should Track, where portal monitoring fits in the broader operational picture
Full Session Transcript
The following is a cleaned and lightly edited transcript of the full workshop session. Waiting room content has been omitted.
Will Yang: Alright, let’s get started here. Welcome, everybody, and welcome to today’s session, which is going to be called the Disability Firm Playbook Number 2: What You Are Missing Every Time That You Log Into the ERE, AARPS, as Well as AROS.
This session is going to be recorded. A few reminders: this session’s gonna run roughly an hour. What we’re gonna do is run you through a live portal walkthrough of the ERE, talk about the AARPS, and talk about what we know about the AROS portal. If you have any questions along the way, just include a hashtag in front of your question in the Zoom chat.
The recording will be shared with you within the next day or so. And if you stay until the end, we’re gonna share with you how you can get 4 AI prompts built for just your ERE status reports, whether or not you use Chronicle, you may find it useful when you are using Claude, GPT, and whatnot.
What we’re gonna walk away from today’s session: we’re going to explore what exactly is the ERE, AARPS, as well as AROS, and what they can respectively surface for your firm. We’re also going to talk about core workflow changes that you might see the next time that you were to log in. We’re going to show you some before and after states of how different firms access these portals. And lastly, we’re going to talk about where Chronicle fits in.
With that, a quick round of introductions. I’m Will, I lead events and community here at Chronicle. This is part of our series called the Disability Firm Playbook, the first session was about a few months ago, talking about how to help you spot at-risk cases before they escalate. The spirit behind this series is essentially to help provide more educational opportunities for people to understand on the operations side what we see from talking to hundreds of disability firms. I’m also happy to introduce Nikhil. You may recognize him as the founder of Chronicle, the ERE monitoring platform that powers hundreds of thousands of cases, as well as over 2,100 disability reps.
Nikhil Pai: Awesome! Hi guys, great to be talking with you today. I’m super excited about this presentation, going through all three portals. I know that there’s a lot going on in SSA technology, and it can be hard to stay on top of it between the conferences.
The main thing I want to cover from the get-go is this is all about making your firm more proactive. These portals are your source of data, they’re always up to date, but they’re really hard to know what’s going on. For a lot of firms, that either means someone is tasked with checking each of these portals each day, or a couple times a week. That’s how you’re reactive, you’re going one by one through the ERE to see what has changed in this dashboard sheet or in the e-files. Or you’re waiting on the mail, which just means you’re already delayed. Often, the mail is past the deadline by the time it arrives, especially if you’re covering a client who’s out of state. The USPS is just very slow right now.
So you’re often reactive. It’s a story I hear all the time from firms where they’re getting a call from a client saying, hey, I just got a decision, or I just got a questionnaire, why didn’t you tell me about it?
How do you know if you’re being reactive? One, you’re checking when you have time, either it’s a person, it’s the mail, you have this scheduled block maybe once a week where you’re opening every piece of mail and scanning it, or you have some scheduled block where you’re checking the ERE. That’s not often enough. Two, you’re going case by case, you’re going to each ERE folder, opening each piece of mail, thinking about each case one at a time, versus what is your overall workload? Three, you’re creating silos amongst your team. And last, you’re waiting on the mail or a client call. If your client has to notify you about the work you need to do, that’s a really bad sign.
This is a really great example, Will Viner has been with us for a while, and he loves Chronicle for this reason. As Will said: “We would receive calls from our clients telling us they’ve been approved or denied. That doesn’t look very good professionally.”
Will Yang: Awesome, and with that, what I’d like to hear from folks in the Zoom chat is, on a typical week, how much total time does your team spend across different government portals? A, less than an hour; B, 1 to 3 hours; C, 3 to 5 hours; or D, more than 5 hours.
Alright, we’ve got more than 5 hours, less than 1 hour, more than 5 hours, 10 or more. Somewhere between 3 to 5 hours, and more than 5 hours. A lot of C’s and D’s. Some 1-3 hours, but mostly the room is looking like C’s and D’s.
Nikhil Pai: So, just to recap, there’s actually more than one portal. You guys are probably familiar with the ERE, which also goes by two other acronyms, the BSO and the ARS. Just know when I say ERE, I mean any of those. It’s all about the case status, that spreadsheet of all the case statuses, where they are, any decisions at the hearing and appeals level, any hearing schedules. And then they also have the e-file section of the ERE, which is actually viewing the exhibits and case docs for each case.
Then we now have the new AARPS, the Appeals and Appointed Representative Processing Services. It’s a mouthful. They launched it about a year or two ago, and it actually has 2 new pieces of information: you can view field office data, and view fee payments. Two pieces of information you couldn’t see beforehand, because if it’s a technical denial, it doesn’t even hit the ERE, and fee payments are not in the ERE at all.
And the last one is AROS, the Appointed Representative Online Services. If you were at NOSSCR in Baltimore this year, you may have seen the SSA talking about it. It’s the new portal that the SSA is developing to replace both the ERE and the AARPS. Currently, it’s in a limited run with just a few firms. I personally have not seen it, but I have heard quite a bit about it from the NOSSCR team.
Awesome! So, with that, let’s start with a live demo of what’s possible with the ERE. Let me know if you guys can see it.
Yep, looks good.
Alrighty, so this is the ERE BSO/ARS, triple acronym we all know and love. I’ll start with the status reports. The first thing you can access in the ERE is this dashboard data, a big spreadsheet of all the information in the ERE across all your cases. There are 3 different files: the hearing file, the appeals file, and then the initial and recon file. Make sure you always download the full spreadsheet, because that has a lot more information. If you just view the list, it gives you a couple columns, but if you download the full spreadsheet, you’ll get a large document with all these columns around the hearing office, the status date, the claim type, and so on.
The initial and recon list is the newer one. It’s been out for 2 years, but I know it’s not often talked about. You can go in there, and you have to scroll down past all this and download the spreadsheet. That spreadsheet contains a lot more information. You get the case level, the date first assigned, if it was sent to FQR for a quality review, the closure date. There can be a lot of information here, it’s very messy. They even include things like any info requests, any medical evidence requests, and any CEs for any consultative exams they’ve booked for your client.
Then the other thing you’re able to do is access the claimant folder. You enter the passcode, and each time you log in, you have to enter the passcode again. You enter in the client’s social, and as you know, every now and then, the socials can become revoked and invalid, so you can trigger a lockout. Then you get the full list of documents, case documents and exhibits. The best way to use this and see what’s new is in case documents: scroll by EF Received, that’s the date they received the document. It puts things in chronological order.
Just to recap: this is the way most firms currently navigate the ERE. They look at the three spreadsheets, and they look at the e-files. Most firms usually only look at the spreadsheets and open up the e-file prior to hearing. That’s the standard pattern, they’ll open the e-file when the hearing gets scheduled, again one week before, and again one day before.
With that said, I’m gonna now jump to the next piece, which is what can you actually do to improve this workflow so that way you’re less reactive? This is where the benefit is, now there’s a lot of AI tools that make your life a little bit easier to organize your data.
You’ve probably heard from a lot of folks, you can’t pop in the actual medical records into ChatGPT or Claude, that’s true if you’re using the consumer accounts. But something you can put in there is actually the spreadsheet data. These spreadsheets don’t contain anything that is overly medically related, so it’s a lot safer to actually put in the chatbot.
We’ve actually created 4 AI prompts: events, outstanding questionnaires, what changed, and active caseload by status. To use these tools, they’re simple. Let’s start with just the event one. I can click open in Claude. This will preload the prompt for me, and I can just drag in a report. This is what Claude will now start spinning and run through and try to actually extract all of the hearings for you.
And with some movie magic, I’ll skip ahead and show you what that looks like. This is a CE one I ran a little bit earlier. I put in my initial and recon report, and you can see it runs all of its magic and creates a spreadsheet for me with all of the events, every CE, the start time, the end time, the time zone, the status, and the location. And the great thing about AI is you can ask follow-up questions: what CEs are canceled? And it will actually be able to answer the question off of this dataset. Another thing you can do is ask this to convert it into an iCal that you can add to your calendar.
We also have the outstanding questionnaire prompt, I’ve run this one in ChatGPT, just to show you it does work in any AI system. I dropped in my spreadsheet of all of my initial recon cases, gave the prompt. Once again, it creates a spreadsheet for me. I can now see for all my clients what questionnaires are currently open. Then we also have the what changed, drop in two reports, one from the previous day or week and one from today. I gave it the prompt, and now it creates a diff of all the changes. I can see that this person here got a favorable decision, and I can ask, what decisions are favorable? I get a full list of all my clients who now have favorable decisions, and I can go call them and give them the good news, and I’m ahead of the mail again.
Then, I’ll show you the last way, which is how you do this with Chronicle. The way Chronicle works is we scan the ERE every 2 hours for the status report, and then we open the e-file every single day for every single client. Rather than even having to download this out of ERE and run it through AI, you get a holistic dashboard showing you everything that’s changed within 2 hours. And every day for e-files.
For initial and recon-level cases, Chronicle will go and open up that e-file, find the DDE, and actually extract the decision for you. And then our recent documents section is your virtual mailbox, whether it’s new evidence, questionnaires, CE reports, earnings reports, you click into them and view them right out of Chronicle.
To take it to the next level, Chronicle has a great notification system where each person can follow a case, turn on notifications, and get notified via email inbox. I can click into these, and I will now have this email notification telling me, hey, this decision was issued. I can click, view the client, and it opens right to their page. And then we also have a great digest, so if you want just a daily digest, I can get a quick overview of all of that.
Just to recap: what most firms are doing today, they’re going into the ERE one by one, checking what’s changed on the status report sheet and in the e-file, manually filtering that spreadsheet. It’s easy to miss e-file changes because documents aren’t organized in a way that makes it easy to see what’s new. And they’re manually updating case management systems. Chronicle can also make automatic updates to your case management system if it’s one of our supported integration partners.
Then there’s the AI-enabled ERE workflow, drop status report sheets into a chatbot, transform the data into CEs and hearing events you can view and add to your calendar, quickly identify outstanding questionnaires, see what’s changed since the last time you checked, and build out a report of your stats.
Then there’s the proactive automated ERE workflow empowered by Chronicle, where Chronicle’s doing all the checking for you. We’re checking this dashboard sheet, we’re checking the e-file, putting it on our dashboard so you can quickly see what’s changed, adding notifications, and syncing that data into your case management system.
At a high level, what to take from the ERE: have it on your calendar, make sure it’s something you check frequently, or use Chronicle to always have it be something you can see as it changes. Use date filters on the spreadsheets or on the e-file. And remember, always open the e-file in addition to the status reports, there’s a lot more information in the e-files, like those DDEs.
Awesome, alrighty. Now I’m going to the AARPS. First of all, I assume maybe 50% of you probably don’t know how to create your AARPS account. Anyone who has an ERE account also has access to the AARPS, it’s automatically connected, but they first need to create a login.gov account. You go to login.gov, you create your account, verify your identity using your real ID or driver’s license or passport book, enter in your social security number, match your phone number, and then your account will get created. The person creating this login.gov account must have the same SSN and contact information as they have for their ERE account. Otherwise, it won’t link up.
Something I do want to flag that’s very important: the way login.gov works is it’s actually a hub for all of your government accounts. It connects to your personal SSA account, your VA account, your TSA account, your SBA accounts, if you have any of those. If you do create this login and connect this to your AARPS, be careful about sharing your login.gov information with the rest of your staff, because they will be able to then access all of this personal data. This is why login.gov and AARPS has not traditionally been used by large firms.
The cool things that are in the AARPS: first is fee payment history. They’ll tell you for what claimant, for which program, whether it’s SSI or SSDI, what date they made it, and how much they were paying out. That way, you’re able to stay on top of what fee payments have been made. Then they also have case assignment details, at the field office level, before it’s even assigned to DDS, they’ll tell you what cases have been assigned to you. You can also get the non-medical denials in the AARPS, those cases never hit the ERE.
Chronicle actually has a beta feature around automating the fee payment section. We safely store your login.gov information, so your team can still access the data without having full access to your login.gov account. And we’ll notify you every day of new fee payments.
In Chronicle once you’ve hooked up login.gov: under Decisions, we have a fee payment portal now, where you’ll see all your fee payments, safely and securely presented to you and your team. Only users who are a manager role or above, so manager, admin, or billing owner, are able to see the fee payment data.
If you want to set it up: go into your profile, then AARPS, enter in your login.gov username and password, and then the OTP code setup. You agree to their terms of service, save it, and then you can also turn on fee payment notifications. We’re checking every day for new fee payments.
Great! Now going to AROS. AROS is the future portal that will be replacing the ERE and the AARPS. It is for all appointed representatives, it’s going to ideally combine those data sets, but the MVP, the Minimum Viable Product that they claim to be launching in Q4 of 2026, will probably have a subset of the data. They plan on having something in Q4, and eventually rolling in all the things that the AARPS and the ERE have into this one new portal.
Fun fact: we recently learned that the SSA is trying to model a little bit off of Chronicle. But it will likely be a limited set of features compared to Chronicle. What this means for your firm: it’s gonna be another portal to manage in the beginning stages. In the beginning, that means you will now have 3 portals you will need to check. Ideally, if you’re using Chronicle, we’ll check all of them for you.
Where Chronicle will fit in: we always hope to be your hub for all of this data. We’re going to be monitoring, we’re in touch with NOSSCR and NADR about when this is coming out. We are tracking it, and will fold that information into Chronicle when it becomes available.
Just as a quick recap: what Chronicle does in the ERE is we check the status reports every 2 hours, and then the e-file every single day for every single case. For the AARPS, we can make your single login.gov secure, so your team can still access the data, and lets you monitor for new fee payments. And for AROS, we are monitoring the situation, and we’ll make sure that when it rolls out, we’re able to grab that data, put it in our dashboard, and also push it out to your case management systems for you.
And lastly, just some what’s new in Chronicle. We now have our LexMed integration live, really great for getting pre-hearing briefs, chart reviews, and medical chronologies. The first one is free. We have an updated interface that launched this week that really tried to clean up and modernize the look and feel of the case details. I know some folks are missing the activity history, that will be coming back in a case feed section probably Monday. And we now have more user roles for you to manage access, so you can now turn on and off who can see reports, who can assign things.
We are working on a client portal and client communication system. In the near future, we’ll be testing out a little bit of that. We have a follow-up session on all of our H1 updates, which will preview some of these features.
Will Yang: Yup, and I just dropped that link in the chat. In the case where you are doing this manually or by yourself, and you try our AI-enabled workflows, and you want this to be done for you, and you haven’t checked us out, you can check out that last link in the Zoom chat to book a time to talk about your situation. We have a free trial where you can try monitoring this for 14 of your own cases.
As a recap from today’s workshop, the key takeaway is that you already have a lot of this information that allows your firm to go from being reactive to being proactive. The question is whether or not your workflow is actually getting it to a place of efficiency and allowing you to be proactive.
If you are looking for these four free AI tools, you’ll get them by submitting feedback as a reminder for the workshop today, that’s in the Zoom chat. The other thing is you can access these directly at www.chroniclelegal.com/playbook.
As Nikhil mentioned, next week on the 16th, we have our summer launch event. That’s where we’ll recap all of the new integrations and updates that we’ve released in Chronicle this year, as well as where we’re headed next.
Will Yang: The first question was from Brock, is that only with the OHO ERE list about favorable decisions?
Nikhil Pai: Yeah, so assuming you’re talking about the status reports, only the hearing and appeals level do they actually show favorable and unfavorable decisions in the status report sheet. For the initial recon level cases, the only way to actually see the decision is to open up the e-file, go to Section A, and hopefully they’ve uploaded the DDE. About 80% of the time, they upload it on the date they close out that initial and recon case, so it’s a pretty safe bet that if you see it as closed on the initial and recon dashboard, you can go find the DDE. But for that last 20%, it can be up to 4 weeks later that they actually upload the DDE.
Will Yang: Joe was asking if it has to be a login.gov to connect AARPS to Chronicle, or if it can be an ID.me.
Nikhil Pai: Yeah, so Chronicle only works with login.gov. We do not support ID.me for the AARPS. However, the AARPS does allow you to actually have both simultaneously, so you can have an ID.me account and a login.gov account, and just use the login.gov with Chronicle.
Will Yang: Sherry asked the question of if you can pick which reports folks can see.
Nikhil Pai: Yes. It’s just the whole reporting tab that you can remove access to from your team. It’s pretty much an on and off for that reports tab.
Will Yang: For a firm that’s never been systematic about how they’re checking these portals, where would you start with all these potential workflow changes?
Nikhil Pai: As you scale your practice, more and more things change. The first step is most firms dedicate a single person to running these workflows, where it’s their job every day to go run and see what’s new in the ERE. Usually they skip the e-file and just focus on the status reports. Then the next level: they realized the ERE is too unwieldy at their size, and so they just focus on the mail. They accept that they’re going to be behind because it’s based on mail, but those deadlines are usually not hard, so they’re okay with just having the mail trigger their workflows. And then, finally, they adopt a system like Chronicle to automate these workflows.
Will Yang: One of the questions I had as you were demoing the AI-enabled workflows is context windows. How much of these exports can a single thread support? When would it potentially start hallucinating?
Nikhil Pai: With spreadsheets like what we are uploading here, it’s actually structured data, and so not all of it has to be loaded in memory, it just knows the file’s there, and it can parse it using code. A 3,000 case firm can still safely upload these spreadsheets. And the great thing about the prompts we’ve created is they’re good at essentially whittling down that data to make it even smaller, so you can answer questions more legitimately.
Will Yang: When it comes to expanding upon these prompts, if someone is more AI-curious, what would you encourage them to explore?
Nikhil Pai: Start asking questions. It will either hit a wall, or it will give you something that you’ll be surprised by. Whether you wanted to create a graph, a pie chart of your caseload, you would ask it to do that. Or, if you wanted to draft emails for all of those CE appointments, you can actually ask it to do that. There’s a lot of power there, and what we’ve done for you is teed up the structured data so it knows what it’s working with.
Will Yang: Anne was asking whether or not Chronicle integrates with Prevail.
Nikhil Pai: Unfortunately, we do not integrate with Prevail. They are a system that was built in the 90s and doesn’t have any API access. We have a lot of firms who use Chronicle side-by-side with Prevail. But for the firms that are really thinking about scaling, they are moving off of Prevail. We do integrate with systems like Clio, Filevine, Litify, MyCase, Zapier, Dib Case, and Wings. For Clio, Filevine, and Litify, we’re able to actually push the documents in there also, so you don’t have to scan the mail as much.
Will Yang: What’s the broad docket for other integrations from a case management side?
Nikhil Pai: We’re actively working on NIOS right now, and that should be coming out very soon. We’re beta testing it with a firm who’s actually on this call, and then after that, the next two are Smart Advocate and Law Ruler. The more demand we have, the faster we’ll build it.
Will Yang: Another question: which of these portals would you say gives the most leverage if you had time to improve just one workflow?
Nikhil Pai: I’ll give two answers. The most underrated workflow definitely is AARPS. Most firms don’t know about it, they don’t use it, they’re a little bit afraid of it because of the login.gov. But you need to get paid, and so if you know the money coming in the door, you can better invest in your business. From a business perspective, AARPS is definitely the most interesting. Otherwise, for the ERE: if you’re running hundreds or thousands of initial recon level cases, logging into the e-file to get the DDEs and know that you can file an appeal really helps you move faster.
Will Yang: Alright, with that, I think we’ve covered all the questions for today. I’m gonna wrap up the recording here. Thank you, everybody, for joining us for the second session of the Disability Law Firm Playbook. Today we talked about these three different government portals, what you can take out of them, not only the AI-enabled workflows, but also how Chronicle can help you do this all automatically as well. If you’re looking for more information, check your email for the recap, that’ll be sent in the next day. Otherwise, I’ll catch you all next time. Thanks so much, everybody. Have a good rest of your day.