OUTSIDE SSA DISABILITY REPRESENTATION FOR LAW FIRMS

When your client’s matter also involves a disability claim, “not our practice area” doesn’t have to cost you the client.

Adam Whalan spent more than a decade inside the Social Security Administration, adjudicating thousands of SSDI and SSI claims. Now he provides outside SSA administrative representation for law firms whose clients face a Social Security disability issue alongside their main matter — so the disability side is handled by someone who knows how SSA decides cases, while your firm keeps its client relationship intact.

Any fee for claimant representation is handled through SSA’s authorization process; where direct payment applies, SSA pays the authorized fee from withheld past-due benefits. Nothing passes between your firm and Adam for referring, sending, or naming a claimant — and each firm evaluates the arrangement under the professional-responsibility rules that apply to it.

See how it works Contact for law firms

A professional reviews a Social Security disability case file at a desk.

Three ways to work together

Every engagement begins with the claimant’s authorization and stays inside SSA’s administrative process. Depending on your firm’s involvement, it takes one of three forms.

Co-representation

The claimant appoints both an attorney at your firm and Adam as representatives before SSA, each through SSA's own appointment process. Any representative fee remains a single SSA-authorized fee, subject to SSA's caps and rules — co-representation doesn't create a second fee. This fits when an attorney at your firm has a real, documented role in the SSA matter, and your existing case file (medical records, work history, injury documentation) already supports the disability claim.

Contract support

Your firm engages Adam directly to handle the SSA administrative work on a matter, under a separate written scope of work — straightforward outside support for the piece your firm doesn't do in-house.

III

Referral

Sometimes the simplest path is the right one: you send the claimant to Adam, nothing changes hands in either direction, and your client receives experienced SSA representation without your firm taking on a practice area it doesn't handle.

Not sure which fits a particular client? Let’s make that our first conversation.

Two professionals review case documents together in a conference room.

Why Adam’s SSA background matters

Actual adjudicative experience.

Adam spent more than a decade inside SSA handling and adjudicating thousands of claims, appeals, and post-entitlement matters across SSDI and SSI. This isn’t claims work from the outside looking in — it’s the actual adjudicative experience of deciding eligibility, entitlement, and payment: insured status, date last insured, substantial gainful activity, unsuccessful work attempts, workers’ compensation and public-disability offsets, SSI income and resource rules, reopening and res judicata, overpayments, continuing disability reviews, and effectuating favorable ALJ decisions.

For your firm, that means the SSA issue tangled up in a personal injury, workers’ compensation, employment, family, elder-law, or benefits-planning matter gets evaluated through an SSA-informed lens from the beginning — with technical problems identified early, the claim organized, and the claimant prepared.

Built on SSA’s rules

Claimant-authorized. SSA-appointed. One SSA-authorized fee.

Adam Whalan is an EDPNA — a non-attorney representative eligible for direct payment by SSA. His role is limited to Social Security administrative representation: initial applications, reconsideration, ALJ hearings, and Appeals Council review. He is not an attorney and does not provide court representation or legal services outside that scope.

Because any representative fee exists only through SSA’s authorization process, this is not a referral-fee, lead-generation, or fee-sharing arrangement, and nothing here asks an attorney to divide a legal fee. Your firm’s role, Adam’s role, and any information-sharing are disclosed to and authorized by the claimant before representation begins.

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