James S. Robbins

So, this guy got recommended to my by a friend’s father. As always, if you read my reviews, you know I have systemic mastocytosis, which is a very unpleasant disease. It takes a while to get the treatment protocol right, so as such I made the fairly demoralizing decision to apply for disability. I don’t want this to be a long term thing (see, even in writing a review I’m getting all apologist about it) but it needs to be done, as my medical bills are astronomical and my income is minimal.
So, apply for disability and get rejected. This is apparently par for the course, as everyone gets rejected the first time, after which you get 60 days to apply for a review, and if you don’t, you have to start everything all over again.
Social Security tells me to get a lawyer to help with the process. I turn to a friend whose family is pretty enmeshed in the Boston legal scene, and he recommends Mr. Robbins.
My husband and I met with him and he was incredibly nice and incredibly sympathetic to our situation. He explained what we did wrong with the initial application, what to do for the reapplication, and explained that it would most likely have to go to hearing (as most do apparently).
He then explained that he no longer did disability law as there was little money in it, but he was taking on our case as a favor to the friend who referred us. He then went on to state that if we did all the legwork ourselves (compiling medical records, contact information for doctors, filing consent forms for my doctors to speak to each other as well as him, organizing my medical records by doctor’s specialty, cross indexing everything for ease of reading) it would free up a lot of his time, so he wouldn’t have to charge us as much. Kind of annoying to be doing half the work we expected we’d be paying him to do (as we never expected a reduced rate, we just wanted the name of a good, reputable lawyer to help with my case) but we figured it would be worth it since he seemed to know what he was talking about, coupled with the relatively posh real estate his office occupied, leading us to believe he’d have this one in the bag.
We contacted him a few weeks later to see how things were doing, if there was anything else I should be doing in terms of beginning the review paperwork, and received a terse response that we should not micromanage the case. So we let it drop. I mean, he’d taken my case, he was on our side, he was busy…
Over a month later, I end up in the hospital, after which I had to see a bunch of my specialists to figure out what was up. I asked them if they had heard from my lawyer yet, as he had told me he was going to contact them to get them to write letters explaining the systemic nature of my illness and why at the current time I can’t work. Not a single doctor had heard from him. Now, bear in mind, this wouldn’t have been a big deal save for the fact that I had that 60 day review deadline hanging over my head, and we were well more than 30 days into it.
We called on a Monday, left a message with his secretary. She told us he’d call us the next day. Tuesday came, we heard nothing. Waited a few more days, since again, I mean, he’s my lawyer, he took my case, we’re going to be paying him a fair chunk of change when this is over, this guy is getting paid to be my advocate, we worked our asses off doing what his paralegal would’ve been doing because he asked us to…
Late Saturday night we get an email from him stating that, «Oh gee, my roster is really really full right now and I can’t take your case anymore. Sorry about that. Call the Mass Bar referral line for a new lawyer, and I’ll overnight all the paperwork you provided to me over there»
…
What helpful advice. I mean, shit, Social Security had recommended that I call the Mass Bar referral line to get a disability lawyer around 50 days earlier. I obviously should have taken that advice then.
I mean, this guy left me with around 20 days to find a new lawyer, let alone have them accept my case, and then start the whole process over again. Which, when you are dealing with disability stuff is pretty scary since the bureaucracy of Social Security is dense at best, and unforgiving at worst, and was utterly unsympathetic to my sob story that my lawyer dumped me at the 11^th hour.
PLUS, I don’t even know when he was planning on telling us that he dropped our case. We had tried to get in contact with him multiple times before we got a fucking –email– telling us «oh sorry, my bad». He had to have known he had a heavy caseload when he took our case, he had to have known he had a heavy caseload when he sent us the terse email telling us not to micromanage the case… But yet he didn’t bother to inform us it was so heavy he was dropping us until practically the last minute.
I wonder if he would’ve told us at all if we hadn’t tried to get in touch with him to find out the status of our case.