Legal representation in disability claims

Legal representatives play a prominent role in the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) adjudication process, earning fees totaling $1.2 billion in 2019. Long ubiquitous in appellate hearings, legal representation has begun appearing more frequently at the beginning of cases, during the initial review. Using novel administrative data, we provide the first causal estimates of the impact of legal representation on SSDI case outcomes when representatives are engaged from the initial stage. To address selection into representation, we instrument for initial representation using geographic and temporal variation in the lagged share of appellate cases handled by private law firms (as opposed to public interest organizations or family). Among applicants on the margin, initial representation increases the probability of an initial award by 24 percentage points and reduces time to final decision by nearly a year. The increased awards are for applicants with the most severe, automatically qualifying conditions, indicating that representatives bring needed technical expertise to the initial filing. However, representation at the initial level reduces the probability that the case is ever appealed by 38 points, with two-thirds of this reduction coming from increases in initial allowances and one-third from fewer appeals following initial denials. We show that the benefits of initial representation are concentrated among people with mental diagnoses, while those with musculoskeletal diagnoses do not benefit. Our results suggest that representation leads to a reduction in application burdens and may improve target efficiency.