In May 2026, a group of large Social Security disability practices joined Disability Peers in Practice, a monthly gathering that Chronicle runs as part of building the virtual community the SSD bar has been missing: no slides or vendor pitches, just practitioners comparing notes on what’s actually working.
This cohort skewed toward firms with multiple attorneys, dedicated case managers, and enough volume that operational decisions have real financial consequences. The conversation covered case management software, AI tools, staffing models, and the workflow problems that don’t show up in vendor demos. Here’s what came out of it.
About This Cohort
This group represented large SSD practices across the country: firms with multiple attorneys handling dozens of hearings a month, alongside dedicated intake teams, case managers, and in some cases overseas staff. Several firms were actively building custom automation infrastructure. The shared challenge: as these firms have grown, the management and operational load has outpaced what any one attorney-owner can carry.
Scaling Requires an Operations Lead, and They Need Everything
- Multiple firm owners are at or past the point of hiring a fractional or full-time COO
- The ops lead needs full system access, goal-based direction, and documented SOPs from day one, not just a mandate
- The hire creates onboarding overhead before it creates capacity; firms that skip documentation pay for it twice
The topic that opened both sessions was COO hiring. Multiple firm owners described hiring or planning to hire a fractional or full-time operations lead as a direct response to the growth-versus-capacity squeeze.
What practitioners found: it’s not as simple as delegating.
I don’t have the time and the ability to manage the company anymore. I’m still representing clients, and I’ve got too many clients, and more coming. I needed somebody to shore up all of the processes and procedures. — Travis
But onboarding that person was more involved than expected:
I had to get them a Clio license, and I needed to get them an Outlook license. Basically it was like bringing on another employee. They need access to everything if they’re not in-house. — Travis
The practitioners who’d been through this before shared what they wish they’d known: set deliverables from day one, give direction with goals attached, and don’t expect them to figure out the firm’s processes on their own.
“We’re hiring VAs and scaling up overseas workers. The reason we’re doing this is so I can not work a thousand hours a week. In our roles, we should be working like three days a week, and the other two days doing business generation stuff.” — TC. TC’s practice handles around 4,000 active SSDI cases across three attorneys.
What this means: the COO hire isn’t the end of the problem. It’s the beginning of a systems build. Firms that haven’t documented their workflows before bringing on an ops lead find themselves bottlenecked on onboarding rather than gaining capacity.
More on scaling without breaking operations: How to Grow from 150 to 600 Cases Without Breaking Your Operations and How to Know When Your Disability Firm Is Ready to Hire.
SOPs Have to Be Visual and Idiot-Proof to Actually Work
- Text-heavy SOPs don’t hold with remote or overseas staff; Loom videos and flowcharts are what actually get followed
- The best SOPs show both what a staff member should do AND what the automated system is handling in parallel
- At one firm, every role has a Confluence page mapping responsibilities alongside automation context
The follow-on to the COO conversation was documentation. Everyone in the room had built, or was actively building, standard operating procedures for their case management workflows. The consensus: text-heavy SOPs don’t hold.
Travis: “I spent about 7-8 hours in AI, with Claude, building out all these different SOPs that were visually appealing. Then I realized implementation is a whole other animal, because that involves training employees.”
TC described the approach his firm settled on: “I use Loom videos. You create these training videos, and then they write the SOPs for you, but the video is idiot-proof. They can see what you’re doing, pause it, back it up, see where you clicked.”
“Not only have documents, but also visuals, a lot of flowcharts. This event has occurred, it will trigger these things, so the caseworkers can pull that up and say, this event happened, what do I need to do, or what is the automated system doing, and what do I need to check on?” — John
At one firm, every role has a Confluence page showing what documents apply to that role and what the automated systems are doing in parallel, so staff are never guessing whether a task is being handled.
Related reading: Automation Benchmarks for Disability Firms and How to Run a Remote or Hybrid Disability Law Firm.
The CMS Question Has No Easy Answer at Scale
Case management software came up in both sessions and consumed a large portion of the discussion. Filevine, Clio, Litify/Salesforce, and Prevail each have real trade-offs at large-firm scale.
Filevine: Several practitioners described Filevine’s phase-based workflow as a genuine advantage for SSD practices.
We’ve created a phase for pretty much every single step of the Social Security process that you would see in Chronicle: initial staging, assigned, decision, and then all of the hearing phases. Based on that, when the file changes phase, an automatic task can be created in a certain timeframe. — John
For staff who are new to Social Security, having tasks generated automatically means they don’t need to know the whole process; the system feeds them what comes next.
But Filevine’s depth comes with a cost. Jeff, who has been on Filevine for seven years:
Everything you want to add onto it is a charge. Lead Docket is a charge. Domo for metrics is a charge. WordPlus is a charge. A lot of the stuff that they do at Filevine is designed for personal injury firms.
And migration is a real barrier: “There’s just no way to avoid it being a mess.”
Travis described the catch-22 plainly:
Switching from Clio to Filevine was, A, a gigantic cost. And then B, the configuration part. I don’t have the time to do all the configurables. If I wanted to use a third party to do it, it was just adding cost upon cost.
Clio: Shiv came to Clio when starting the firm: “I am excited that with Chronicle, it seems like it has more of an open API, that’s the draw for me, especially to try to connect the two so they can talk to one another.” Tony offered a frank summary of the trade-offs:
Clio’s strengths are the workflow and the customization. Its weakness: dividing it up into Grow and Manage is kind of funky. And the reports are just terrible. I’ve never seen such poor reporting options. — Tony
Chronicle as a layer: One practitioner put the case for Chronicle as a complementary layer in plain terms: “Thank God for Chronicle, because that’s where I’m pulling up all the real-time data quickly. I can’t look at the status of a case on my CMS dashboard. It’s buried in custom fields. Chronicle is where I figure out what’s up.”
Shiv described moving to Chronicle after years on Assure, a move driven less by Assure’s performance and more by integration needs:
We had previously been using Assure for a number of years, mainly for the ERE access, which was great, and the brief writing and medical record summaries. But unfortunately they have a closed API. So as I’ve been exploring this year to try to link something to Clio with the ERE, that’s where we started talking with Nikhil and the Chronicle team. — Shiv
Chronicle’s open API and direct integration with Clio was what made the switch make sense.
For how ERE data flows into each platform, see Automate Every Filevine Phase with ERE Data, Keep Every Clio Matter Current, and Connecting Litify (Salesforce) and Chronicle. On the broader switching pattern: Why Disability Firms Are Switching from Assure and Case Management Tools That Integrate with ERE.
The Association Problem Doesn’t Go Away at Scale
- Getting associated with cases after initial filing requires active follow-up; it doesn’t improve as volume grows
- Large-volume practices are dedicating part-time to full-time headcount specifically to field office follow-up
- The fix that works: embed association follow-up as a repeating CMS task that gates the next CMS phase
Getting properly associated with cases at the field office level came up as a persistent operational drain, and one that scales poorly.
Travis: “I’m only getting associated with about 30% of all the cases I’m taking in. I’m sitting on hundreds of cases that I’m not associated with, and I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or what. That part of the process for me feels broken.”
“We assigned a part-time employee specifically to follow up with the field office between applying and what we call initial, because we’re just not getting on a lot of the cases unless we call and follow up and call and follow up.” — TC
“Once we file the initial claim, an automatic task is created when we change the phase to initial filed. It repeats every 15 days for them to call the field office and make sure we’re associated with it. I won’t leave that phase until they’ve either confirmed it, or it shows up in the ERE in Chronicle, then it pushes to another phase automatically.” — John
The firms that have addressed this most effectively have embedded it directly into their CMS workflow as a repeating task that gates the next stage. For others, it remains a manual, headcount-intensive process.
More on automating this follow-up: How to Automate ERE Tracking.
AI Automation: From Off-the-Shelf to Custom-Built
The AI conversation split between practitioners using established platforms and those building their own internal tools (sometimes on the same day).
LexMed chronologies came up in Session 2 as a recent Chronicle partner integration getting strong early reviews. Tony described the quality: “Nick does a really good job of boiling down the pre-hearing brief to two to three pages. It’s clearly a program built from somebody who’s experienced in appellate litigation. It’s been very good at picking out relevant and claimant-friendly imaging and tying it to the brief.” The differentiator practitioners pointed to: the appellate litigation background embedded in how briefs are structured.
Foundation AI for mail processing came up as a meaningful investment for large-volume firms. TC described the workflow: bulk-scan all incoming SSA mail, push it through Foundation AI, which classifies document type and matter association, then routes tasks automatically into the CMS. At one firm, the bill runs $2,300/month; at another, $2,500–$3,500. One practitioner’s framing of the ROI: “If it saves me four hours plus a day of a talented person who can then do something else, that more than justifies the cost.” The added perspective: “I thought it was expensive, and then my mail person quit. It took a month to catch up.” At this point, mail processing is 80% automated.
Custom tools built with Claude Code drew the most energy in the room. “It tracks all new scheduled cases, spins through your read, then tells me what’s missing, then it looks at my emails, and spins an email to the client saying, here’s what we think we know, and here’s what we’re confirming.” — John. It runs on AWS LightSail for about $10/month, alongside N8N for automation workflows that replaced Zapier at no additional cost.
The gap between firms with in-house technical resources and those relying on outside vendors was real and acknowledged. As Travis put it: “The more advanced features you’re talking about, I would love to know, practically, how to do that.”
Prevail’s API status came up directly in Session 2, with practitioners pushing back on the announcement made at a recent industry conference. John, who works closely with the Prevail development team, gave a frank assessment: “They were like, oh, the keys are not exactly ready yet. It’s basically ready. So they’re kind of waving their hands a little bit. It’s still basically in development. They certainly don’t have an API for things triggering processes, history entries, ledger, anything besides matter information. Yet.” For firms planning automations that depend on that API, the advice was direct: don’t take it at their word that it’s ready.
Chronicle’s webhook was also cited as an integration layer enabling downstream automation: an AI phone caller that notifies clients when a CE appointment is scheduled, attempts contact three times across call, text, and email, and only escalates to a case manager when all three fail.
Related reading: Hearing Prep Without the Manual Work: Chronicle + LexMed, Disability Law Office Mailroom Survival Guide, and Do You Need Chronicle if You Already Use Prevail?.
ERE Access for Federal Practice: An SSA Problem, Not a Chronicle One
- ERE access drops when cases go to federal court or after appeals are filed past set timelines; this is SSA removing access, not a Chronicle limitation
- Chronicle retains historical ERE data up to the point of access removal; the problem is no new updates after that
- Firms with federal dockets need a manual backstop: dedicated staff checks or a CMS flag when a case enters federal status
Practitioners with federal court dockets raised a specific and serious workflow gap: ERE access via Chronicle drops when a case goes to federal court, or after appeals are filed past a set timeline.
Deborah, who has a heavy federal practice, described discovering the issue the hard way: “A remand client called on a Friday and said, you guys are going to be with me Monday. We opened up Chronicle and the last entry had been made in Chronicle months before.”
“Social Security is removing cases from ERE access after set timelines because they’re not processing the appeals or the hearings in a way that maintains that for us. I don’t think that’s anything Chronicle can do. It just seems like Social Security has an issue there.” — John
The consensus: for affected cases, the ERE historical data that Chronicle has retained up to the point of access removal remains valuable. But once access drops, firms need a manual backstop: staff assigned to check ERE directly, or a workflow flag when a case enters federal status. Several practitioners suggested NOSSCR and NADR advocacy as the most realistic path to a systemic fix.
Related: Managing the SSA Federal Court Workload Surge.
Also in This Series
The May 2026 cohort also included a separate session for solo and small-firm practitioners. That conversation covered CMS switching costs, AI tool comparisons for brief writing and VE questions, medical chronology pricing trade-offs, and why integration has become the primary evaluation criterion.
About This Series
The SSD community has been missing a regular virtual space where practitioners in similar situations talk through real operational problems together. Chronicle built Disability Peers in Practice to be that space.
Sessions run monthly, segmented by firm size, free and capped to keep them small. No slides, no pitches. Just practitioners comparing notes on what’s actually working.
Register for the next session →
About Chronicle
Chronicle is an ERE monitoring and analysis platform built for Social Security disability practices. It automatically checks the SSA’s ERE and e-file daily across your firm’s cases, surfacing status changes, new documents, and upcoming deadlines before they become problems. Chronicle is CMS-agnostic and works with Filevine, Clio, Prevail, and other platforms your firm already uses. Disability Peers in Practice is one of the ways Chronicle brings the SSD community together outside of conference season.