Eric Jones Law

Greetings all from Columbus ODAR,

This month, we’d like to up to date on some changes and activities since we were last in touch.

We are on the verge of getting final approval for an expansion of the office, taking over the rest of the floor. This is great news for us. Columbus has been understaffed for years with our judge to support staff ratio. This has been like the rest of the nation, partly due to budget constraints in the past. However, while other offices have been able to catch up, we’ve been limited by space in the office. We anticipate that the new space will include another hearing room and we anticipate adding another ALJ. Additionally, the new space will include a “spoke” for the National Hearing Center. These facilities, as we understand it, are stand alone offices with smaller video hearing rooms. In Columbus, the NHC space will be apart from Columbus ODAR. We’ll provide systems support, but it will be independent of us in every other way. We don’t have a timeline yet, but we’ll keep you posted as this exciting project moves forward.

Many of you know that Toledo and Akron ODAR offices are opening this month. Just last week, about 120 individuals received ALJ appointments and several of them will be assigned to those two offices. With judges and staff starting from scratch, we expect it will be a while before they schedule significant numbers of cases. Columbus has offered any help we can to both offices as they train staff and judges. There is still no decision on service area realignment (Lima, Mansfield), but again, we’ll let you know.

Speaking of the National Hearing Center, we recently transferred 400 of our oldest cases to the St. Louis NHC and will be transferring 300-400 monthly. You can expect to hear from them directly. We have made the conference room we converted to a video hearing room and one of our regular hearing rooms available to them to schedule hearings

I hope all of you in the area are responding to the effort to form the new CBA Social Security committee. Please contact Julie Hall or Ken Karlock for details. This committee has been a long time coming and we at ODAR are looking forward to this relationship as we work together to best serve your clients.

Finally, I’m pleased to advise that Judge John Montgomery, currently in the Cincinnati office, has accepted an offer to transfer to Columbus, effective August 29. Judge Montgomery was a staff attorney in Columbus for many years and we welcome him back.

More in September. Until then, stay cool!

John R. Allen

Chief U.S. Administrative Law Judge

Social Security Administration / ODAR

(Posted by Law Office of Eric A. Jones, LLC)