Transcript: Hi, I’m Nick Ortiz. I’m a long-term disability attorney 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 in 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 that you’re on a time limit to file your appeal.
As you can tell from your denial letter, you typically only have 180 days to file your appeal and submit all the evidence you need for your case. We need that entire 180 days in order to prepare your appeal because your appeal is not simply writing a letter saying we hereby appeal your decision. You need to give them enough evidence to get them to change their mind.
So the type of evidence that we might need includes updated medical records for your case, perhaps forms from your doctors that identify what your limitations are and why you can’t do your job or perhaps any other job. We might need to put in some legal arguments about the legal errors the insurance company made in issuing the decision. So we need the full 180 days in order to fully develop that type of evidence.
The reason why we need to get all this evidence in during the appeal process is because under 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 and appeal process. So we want to make sure that we pack the record full of good evidence for your case. So 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 full of free resources that will walk you through the application and appeal process. Thanks for watching. We look forward to hearing from you.