Hi, I’m Nick Ortiz. I’m a long-term disability lawyer in Pensacola, Florida. Today we’re going to talk about when is the best time to hire a long term disability attorney to help you with your LTD case. The best time to hire an attorney is as soon as you are denied benefits or if your benefits have been cut off by the insurance company. The reason why you want to hire an attorney as soon as possible is because you’re on a time limit to file your appeal.
As you can see from your denial letter, you usually only have 180 days to file your appeal and submit all the evidence you need for your case. We need the full 180 days in order to prepare your appeal because your appeal is not just a letter saying we are appealing your decision. You have to give them enough evidence to make them change their mind.
So the type of evidence that we might need includes updated medical records for your case, maybe forms from your doctors indicating what your limitations are and why you can’t do your job or maybe some other job. We may need to make some legal arguments about the legal errors the insurance company made in making the decision. So we need the full 180 days to fully develop that kind of evidence.
The reason why we need to get all that evidence in during the appeal process is because in most long-term disability claims, you’re not going to be allowed to introduce any new evidence when you go to court. You’re only going to be allowed to use the evidence that was submitted during the application process and the appeal process. So we want to make sure that we fill the record with good evidence for your case.
If you’d like a free case evaluation, or you’re ready to get started today, give us a call at (888) 321-8131. I’d also like to tell you about a free eBook I wrote called The Top 10 Mistakes That Will Destroy Your Long-Term Disability Case. It’s filled with free resources that will guide you through the application and appeal process. Thanks for watching. We look forward to hearing from you.
