At The Law Office of Nancy L. Cavey, each paralegal was spending 15 to 20 hours per week in the ERE. At Martin, Jones & Piemonte, the estimate was five or six hours per week per paralegal, just checking the ERE. At The Disability Champions, the firm was wasting 80 to 90 man hours a week doing things a machine should handle.

These numbers exist in every disability law firm. Most practices just haven't measured them.

The ERE check is invisible work. It doesn't show up on timesheets the way client calls do. It doesn't generate billable hours. It happens in fragments throughout the day: login, authenticate, check status, download document, rename file, route to the case, repeat. Multiply that by a hundred cases and the hours accumulate in a way that's easy to miss until someone actually tracks it.

This article is about making that invisible work visible. If you can quantify what manual ERE monitoring costs your firm, you can decide whether the math on automation makes sense for your practice.

The Hidden Time Sink in Disability Practices

The pattern is consistent across firms of every size. Paralegals start the day logging into the SSA's Electronic Records Express portal. They authenticate with a time-sensitive passcode. They check each case for status changes, new documents, questionnaires, and hearing notices. They download what's new, rename files to match the firm's naming conventions, and route documents to the right folders or case management entries.

Then they do it again a few hours later. And again before end of day.

The time per case is small; a few minutes when nothing has changed, longer when there's a new document to process. But disability practices don't have one case. They have hundreds. At 50 cases, the daily ERE routine might take an hour. At 100 cases, it's two hours. At 300 cases, a paralegal can spend half their day in the portal.

William Viner of Viner Disability Law described downloading the ERE status sheet up to 20 times per day before he found another approach. At Disability Advocates LLC, the friction increased notably once the caseload reached 100–125 cases. The same work that felt manageable at 50 cases becomes unsustainable as the practice grows.

The problem scales faster than staffing. Hiring another paralegal doesn't solve it; it distributes the same inefficiency across more people.

What ERE Checking Actually Involves

The ERE portal serves a critical function: it's where SSA posts documents, status changes, and notices that determine what happens next in a case. Missing a 10-day deadline notice or a request for additional evidence can derail a claim. Firms check the portal because they have to.

The friction comes from how that checking works.

Authentication requires a two-factor code sent to a registered phone. The code expires quickly. If multiple staff members need access, they're passing codes back and forth, sometimes while someone is in a hearing or on a client call. At SAM G Enterprises, the firm described constantly passing two-factor codes back and forth, getting kicked out of ERE, and struggling to keep track of updates.

Once authenticated, the paralegal reviews each monitored case for changes. New documents need to be downloaded. Status changes need to be noted. Questionnaires and requests need to be flagged for action. Each case takes a minute or two when nothing has changed, but the time compounds across the caseload.

After downloading, files need to be renamed. SSA's default naming conventions don't match how most firms organize their case files. The paralegal renames each document, moves it to the right location, and updates the case management system. This filing work is separate from the checking work, but it's all part of the same workflow.

The work is necessary. The question is whether skilled staff should be doing it manually.

The Math Your Firm Hasn't Done

Here's a calculation most disability firms have never run:

• Paralegal ERE time per week: 10 hours (conservative mid-range estimate)

• Paralegal hourly cost: $25/hour (including benefits and overhead)

• Annual cost per paralegal: 10 × $25 × 52 = $13,000

If your paralegals are closer to the 15-20 hours per week that some firms report, that number climbs to $19,500-$26,000 annually per paralegal.

For a firm with two paralegals spending the higher end of that range:

Two paralegals × 15 hours × $25 × 52 weeks = $39,000 per year

That's the cost of a third paralegal. Spent on portal refreshes.

The opportunity cost is harder to quantify but equally real. Those 15-20 hours per week aren't available for client communication, evidence development, or hearing preparation. The paralegal's actual legal support skills get compressed into whatever time remains after the portal work is done.

The Law Office of Nancy L. Cavey had planned to hire a third paralegal before adopting automation. Chronicle changed that plan. The firm avoided the hiring cost entirely because existing staff could redirect their time from ERE checking to substantive work.

When Manual ERE Monitoring Breaks Down

Manual ERE monitoring works at small scale. A solo practitioner with 30 cases can check the portal daily without it consuming the workday. The problem emerges as practices grow.

At Disability Advocates LLC, the tipping point came around 100-125 cases. The owner described it clearly: "It wasn't as bad at 50 or 75 cases. But once we hit 100–125, it became more and more cumbersome..."

The breakdown happens because the work is linear but caseloads aren't. Each new case adds another entry to check, another potential document to download, another file to process. Staff hours don't scale the same way. Eventually, the monitoring cadence slips. Daily checks become every-other-day. Then twice weekly. Then "when I get to it."

The consequences show up in missed deadlines. Martin, Jones & Piemonte described receiving "a 10-day notice on day 9 or a 25-day letter on day 24." SSA mail timing is unpredictable; by the time the physical letter arrives, the deadline may already be closing in. Firms that rely on manual portal checks to catch these notices early find that the checks happen too late or too sporadically to provide the warning they need.

Client communication suffers too. At Viner Disability Law, the firm would receive calls from clients telling them they'd been approved or denied. The clients knew before the firm did. That doesn't look professional, and it happens when monitoring gaps let SSA updates sit unseen.

How Automation Changes the Equation

Automated ERE monitoring does one thing well: it checks the portal continuously so staff don't have to.

The system logs in, authenticates, and reviews each monitored case on a schedule, typically daily or more frequently. When something changes, a new document, a status update, a deadline notice, the system captures it and sends an alert. The paralegal receives notification of what changed rather than spending hours looking for changes.

What automation doesn't do is make decisions. It won't evaluate whether a denial is worth appealing or whether a medical record supports the claim. It routes information; humans still do the legal work.

The shift is from portal-checking to case-working. Instead of spending the first two hours of the day logging in and refreshing screens, the paralegal reviews a digest of overnight changes and acts on what matters. The checking is done; the responding begins immediately.

Chronicle automates routine ERE document checks so staff do not need to manually log in to look for updates. The system checks the ERE and e-file daily for each monitored case, detecting changes, including new documents, questionnaires, notices, hearing events, and status updates, and summarizing what changed.

Chronicle is CMS-agnostic; it works with any CMS with an API, or no CMS at all. The monitoring layer sits alongside whatever case management system the firm already uses. For more on how to automate ERE tracking, we've written a detailed guide.

What Firms Report After Switching

The time recovery shows up immediately. William Viner of Viner Disability Law estimates Chronicle equals 50–75% of a paralegal in workload capacity (for more detail on what automated ERE document monitoring looks like in practice, see our feature overview). That's not a productivity metric from a vendor; it's an operator quantifying what changed in his practice.

At The Disability Champions, the firm grew from 900 to 3,000 active cases. They eliminated three positions, with Chronicle contributing roughly two-thirds to the staff savings. The 80-90 man hours per week they had been spending on administrative work got redirected or eliminated entirely.

The Law Office of Nancy L. Cavey went from planning to hire a third paralegal to not needing one. The existing two paralegals could handle the caseload once the 15-20 hours per week of ERE checking was automated.

At Martin, Jones & Piemonte, where paralegals had been spending five or six hours per week each on ERE checks, the automation shifted that time to case work. The firm emphasizes speed, coordination, and moving between tasks faster. Chronicle, they said, is "like having the most efficient paralegal in the world...It doesn't take a day off. It gives you all the information you need immediately."

Chronicle supports the full SSD lifecycle: initial, reconsideration, hearing, and post-hearing updates. The monitoring covers every stage, which matters because ERE checking doesn't stop at any particular phase of a case.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much time do paralegals actually spend checking ERE?

Reported ranges vary from 5-6 hours per week to 15-20 hours per week per paralegal. The variation depends on caseload size, how many cases are at active stages, and how frequently the firm checks. Firms with 100+ active cases consistently report higher time investment.

At what caseload does manual ERE monitoring break down?

Most firms report the friction increasing significantly around 100-125 cases. Below that threshold, daily manual checks are manageable. Above it, the time requirement starts crowding out other paralegal responsibilities.

Can automation fully replace paralegal ERE work?

Automation replaces the checking and downloading; it doesn't replace judgment. Paralegals still review what's been flagged, decide what action to take, and handle client communication. The shift is from finding changes to responding to them.

What does ERE automation cost compared to paralegal time?

If a paralegal spends 10-15 hours weekly on ERE checks at $25/hour, that's $13,000-$19,500 annually. Automation solutions typically cost a fraction of that. The ROI calculation depends on your firm's specific caseload and current time investment.

Does automation work with existing case management systems?

Most ERE monitoring solutions, including Chronicle, are CMS-agnostic. They integrate with Clio, and other systems via API, or work independently if the firm doesn't use a CMS. Chronicle also provides case status tracking beyond ERE monitoring.

Conclusion

The hours your paralegals spend checking ERE are real costs, even if they don't show up as a line item. Five hours per week or fifteen hours per week, the time accumulates into thousands of dollars annually that could be spent on work that actually advances cases.

The calculation is straightforward. Estimate your paralegal ERE time. Multiply by hourly cost. Compare to automation pricing. The math either justifies the switch or it doesn't.

For firms at or approaching 100+ cases, the tipping point where manual monitoring becomes unsustainable, the ROI case is usually clear. For smaller practices, it depends on growth trajectory and how much the current ERE friction affects daily operations.

The firms that have made the switch report consistent results: time recovered, hiring avoided, operations smoother. The invisible work becomes visible, and then it becomes automated.

The numbers exist in your practice. The question is whether you've measured them.