Projecting representation fees in Dibcase

[Caleb Alvarez]

Projecting fees in Dibcase is a helpful way to track how much money you expect to receive in the near future on your Social Security cases.

Projected fees help you calculate how much money SSA owes you on your cases.

NOTE: Only admin users can see the "Projected Fees" dashboard panel or access the "Fees and Awards" accordion on the client page.

TIP: Only add a projected fee amount to a claim if you've received a bench decision, award letter, or some concrete evidence that you have won the case. Projected fees or "backpay" are based on the onset date, number of months involved, titles, waiting periods, income, living arrangements, PIA etc. Dibcase does not project fees for you due to the complexity of the factors involved but offers this feature for advanced users who feel comfortable calculating these values.

 

 

To estimate your fees, navigate to the client page and select the claim you want to project fees on and expand the "Fees and Awards" accordion.

Here you can estimate your fees and input that in the "Projected Fees" field. Once you've collected your fees on the case, you should zero out the projected fee amount.

 

 

You can also show your list of cases with pending fees on the claims list page by selecting "Pending" from the Fees dropdown list.

 

Once you've filtered your list to show to cases with "Pending" fees, you can export that list as an excel spreadsheet.

 

Example Fee Calculation for a typical SSI case:

Note: SSI backpay begins the month after the date of onset or application date, whichever is later.

Scenario:

John applied in 05/2018 and was found to be disabled in 09/2018 by the administrative law judge (ALJ)

He owns his home and lives alone (no reduction for the VTR)

The ALJ approves his case in 05/2020

 

Retro period for backpay calculations would be: 10/2018-05/2020

Projected fee would be 20 months X FBR

For demonstration purposes we would project around 15K for the backpay amount and your representation fees would be around $3,750 or 25% of the retro benefit.

You would then add $3,750 into Dibcase as the projected fee...