What is the role of a vocational witness in a Social Security Disability case?

Transcript

The vocational witness plays several roles in a disability hearing.

They’re there to identify my client’s past work. What I mean by that, by occupation, by skill level, by exertional level.

They’re also there to answer questions that the judge may pose or that I might pose under cross-examination. These questions are called hypothetical questions.

And the judge will start, the judge will ask the vocational witness a question that includes limitations, whether it’s physical limitations or mental limitations.

And what I mean by that are lift, carry, sit, stand, your ability to deal with work stress, deal with coworkers, deal with supervisors.

Once that question is posed to the vocational witness, he or she will then provide an answer as to whether or not an individual with those limitations can, one, return to their past work, or, two, make an adjustment based on their age, their education and their work history, to other types of jobs that might exist in the national economy.

So, David, when the vocational experts testify, what do you do to cross-examine the vocational evidence?

There’s a couple of ways that I’ll cross-examine a vocational witness.

One will be with medical evidence or medical source statements. If the judge has not already asked about a particular piece of evidence, I may come back and ask the vocational witness to consider those limitations.

I also have access to the same resources that the vocational witness and the judge used during the hearing, and I can use that as a basis for my cross-examination.

Having access to the same resources as the vocational witness helps me confirm accuracy and the validity of their testimony.

And to just provide an example of what we may encounter during the hearing, during the hearing, especially with vocational witness testimony, I have one example that I like to talk about.

In order to be successful and win my client’s case, we had to prove that my client was unable to be a potato chip inspector.

What’s a potato chip inspector? Basically someone who sits at the end of the conveyor belt and pulls the burnt potato chips off of the line.

In order to eliminate that job and win my client’s case, we had to prove that my client had to alternate between sitting and standing to such a degree that he would be unable to maintain production levels required to perform that job.

One of the examples that I use with clients, along those same lines, is whether you can do a job putting empty bottles in an empty box at the end of an assembly line. And again, the issue then becomes, the issue then becomes, can you do that 8 hours a day? Five days a week, 50 weeks a year, with only normal breaks.