The 15-Day Window Nobody Told You Was Closing
Social Security disability appeals run on hard deadlines. A denial at the initial level triggers a 60-day window to file for Reconsideration. A Reconsideration denial triggers another 60-day window for an ALJ hearing request. An unfavorable hearing decision triggers 60 days to the Appeals Council. Miss any of these windows without establishing good cause, and you lose the established onset date, potentially years of retroactive benefits, and in some cases the entire claim.
The Current Status of Claim field in this intake template is the pipeline view. Appeal Deadline (15 Days) is the status that means everything else stops until that filing is made.
The Intake Pipeline: Seven States, One Claimant
Intake Status runs seven options: Retained, Retainer Sent, No Sign, Dropped, Fired, Thinking About It, Denied. The default is Retainer Sent — the first state after initial contact, before the claimant has returned a signed agreement. This distinction matters because a claimant in "Retainer Sent" status has not yet created a representation relationship; calls to SSA on their behalf, requests for records, and any substantive action are premature until Retained.
No Sign marks claimants who never returned the retainer. Dropped means the claimant withdrew. Fired means the firm terminated representation. Thinking About It is the liminal state: the claimant has been consulted, understands the process, but hasn't committed. These last four statuses are the ones that should age out of the active working queue — filtering for Intake Status = Retained produces the cases that require active management.
Current Status of Claim: Reading the SSA Pipeline
Eleven claim stages map the administrative exhaustion path: Application Needed, Pending at Initial, Appeal Needed, Pending at Recon, Pending at Hearing (Not Scheduled), Pending at Hearing (Scheduled), Good Cause Review, Good Cause Review (Appeal Deadline Passed), Appeals Council, Possible Good Cause Appeal and Re-Apply, Appeal Deadline (15 Days).
The Good Cause states address the scenario where a deadline has passed without filing. SSA allows late appeals under "good cause" — circumstances beyond the claimant's control that prevented timely filing. Good Cause Review (Appeal Deadline Passed) is the triage status: this case needs an immediate assessment of whether good cause arguments exist and whether reopening is viable. Possible Good Cause Appeal and Re-Apply covers the scenario where good cause arguments are weak but a fresh application might reset the onset date with an acceptable loss.
Filtering by Current Status = "Appeal Deadline (15 Days)" at the start of each week surfaces every case where the 15-day buffer before the 60-day window expires has been triggered. Those cases go to the top of the work queue regardless of other priorities.
Identity Fields: The SSA Verification Layer
Mother's maiden name and birth city and state are not demographic curiosities. They're the secondary identification fields that SSA uses to verify identity when calling on behalf of a claimant, particularly for claimants with common names. Without these fields in the intake record, a representative calling SSA on a Monday morning for a "John Smith" in Phoenix is going to spend the first ten minutes of the call establishing which John Smith before any case information is discussed.
Date Retained documents the start of the representation relationship — the signed retainer date that establishes the representative's authority to act and determines the retroactive benefit calculation window if the claim is ultimately approved. The Timestamp field captures when the intake record was created, which for high-volume intakes is useful for identifying cases that have been in "Retainer Sent" status for more than a week without converting.
The contact preference multichoice — Phone, Email, Mail, Text — determines how follow-up happens. Claimants who prefer mail are receiving correspondence on a timeline that makes rapid deadline response impractical; those cases need earlier action triggers than phone or text-preferred claimants who can be reached same-day.