"It tells me the day it happens": How Rabin and Associates stays ahead of every deadline across 2,000 cases

Rabin and Associates has been practicing Social Security disability law since 1981. The firm handles everything in-house — SSI, SSDI, DAC claims, appeals, and federal court — across a caseload that typically sits between 1,500 and 2,000 active cases at any given time.

For most of that history, the ERE was the only way to stay current on case activity. And the ERE has a fundamental limitation: it doesn't tell you when something changes.

"I spent every single day going into the ERE, pulling decisions. Then you have to go find them, and you need a code to get into the ERE."

That daily ritual was fragile in multiple directions. The ERE goes down regularly. When it does, attorneys preparing for hearings lose access to updated exhibit lists entirely. And downloading an exhibit file on a normal day could take hours, depending on how many requests were queued.

The bigger risk was what slipped through. Denial notices from SSA field offices would sometimes never arrive — lost in the mail or sent to an old address because the SSA pulled from the wrong internal system. Every missed notice put an appeal deadline in jeopardy.

"If we don't get the denial and we miss the denial date, we have to write a good cause letter. And there's no good reason for us to do it."

The firm was an early adopter of other ERE monitoring softwares, which added email notifications on top of ERE access. But even with other solutions, the information arrived in a less structured format, and the operational gap between what the ERE knew and what the firm's CMS knew remained open.

The shift started at a conference. Several of the firm's attorneys met Chronicle's founder, Nikhil, and saw a short demo. They came back with a direct message for Shari.

"They were like, you have to see this. You just have to see what this does and how it's going to make our work more efficient."

Before committing, Shari arranged to see Chronicle in action at another disability law firm already using it. She wanted to see real screens and real daily workflows — not a demo environment.

The speed registered first. Exhibit file downloads that took hours through the ERE now take roughly ten minutes through Chronicle. An attorney logging on at 8:00 AM can have a fully updated file by 8:15.

"With Chronicle, you hit refresh and inside of 10 minutes, you have an updated file. The attorney logs on at eight o'clock in the morning, by eight ten, eight fifteen, he's ready to work."

Medical record uploads got faster too. The ERE requires populating the client's Social Security number, the RQ ID, and the date for every upload — copy-and-paste work that stacks up across hundreds of cases. Chronicle pre-populates most of those fields. One of the firm's paralegals summed it up in a team meeting:

Chronicle also handles larger file sizes than the ERE allows directly, eliminating a workaround the firm had been managing for years.

Even the ERE's regular outages became less disruptive. Chronicle can't generate a new exhibit list when the ERE is down, but every previously synced document remains accessible.

"If the ERE is down, there's still no way to get an exhibit list in Chronicle because it's connected to the ERE. But if you open Chronicle, the documents are still all there."

Smaller workflow details added up too. In the ERE, upload confirmations disappear if you don't grab them immediately. Chronicle keeps them.

"When you're in the ERE, if you don't get the confirmation when you've done it, it goes away. When we're in Chronicle, if you forget to upload your confirmation, you just go back and get it."

The most significant change is one that stopped happening: missed deadlines.

"We haven't missed any dates since we've started using Chronicle."

The speed of notification is what makes that possible. Chronicle surfaces decisions the day they enter the ERE, giving the firm time to act before a window closes. The team enters a 14-day follow-up date into Filevine when a decision notification arrives, creating a safety net that didn't exist before.

The client communication shift matters just as much. Shari now knows the moment a hearing gets scheduled — weeks before the notice of hearing mails.

"I can call a client and say, hey, guess what? You've got a hearing. Now, granted, it's not till June. But that notice of hearing may not come out for two or three more weeks. But now the client has the peace of mind that the hearing is on the horizon."

That peace of mind isn't abstract for Shari. She sees what her clients carry every day.

"Our clients are sick. Our clients have mental health issues. Our clients already have anxiety. They already are depressed. They're living in a little bubble waiting for their disability to get approved."

Being able to call with good news weeks early doesn't just improve client satisfaction metrics. It meets people where they are.

The firm is restructuring workflows in anticipation of Chronicle's upcoming Filevine integration. When that integration launches, hearing notice data — time, date, judge, hearing type — will auto-populate instead of requiring manual entry across multiple Filevine screens. Shari sees this freeing staff to focus on substantive case work and enabling the firm to take on more cases.

Rabin and Associates has practiced disability law for over four decades. They have been early adopters of different social security disability technologies. They've watched the ERE evolve and stagnate. Shari's advice for firms still managing the ERE manually is direct.

"For any law firm that's a disability law firm and still using the ERE, you are doing yourself a disservice. You do your clients a disservice as well. Because you can get information out to them faster. You can get their cases ready for a hearing faster. Your team has more time to prepare."

The firm's Chronicle journey is still in early stages. The Filevine integration hasn't launched yet, and the broader workflow restructuring is planned for mid-2026. But the operational shifts are already compounding: documents upload faster, deadlines don't get missed, clients get answers before they have to ask, and the firm is planning for growth.