A Lawyer for Every Veteran

Two veterans come home with the same injuries. One is paid far less than the other. The difference is the claim each of them filed.

When a veteran is hurt or gets sick because of their service, they file a claim with the VA for disability pay. The VA rates each condition in the claim based on the evidence in the veteran's file, and those ratings set what the veteran is paid each month for as long as the ratings stand.

The details of the claim matter. A condition left off the claim isn't rated. If the right evidence is missing, the rating comes back low. For a veteran with no dependents, the difference between a 90 and a 100 percent rating is more than $1,500 a month.

Building a claim is legal work. But veterans build their claims without lawyers.

The reason goes back to a rule written during the Civil War, and that rule still shapes the system today. A lawyer can't charge a veteran anything for help with a claim until the VA has made its decision.

So lawyers wait. They get involved after the VA decides, when a veteran wants to challenge the decision. Nearly four in ten times, the VA's first answer is no. An appeal with a hearing takes more than two years.

Lawyers show up to fix the claim, not to build it. That's backwards.

The rule started for a good reason. During the Civil War, Congress capped what a lawyer could charge a veteran at ten dollars. The cap lasted more than a hundred years. The idea was simple: a veteran's benefits should go to the veteran, not to a lawyer.

The cap is gone, but the idea lives on in today's rule, which still does its job. No lawyer can take a cut of a veteran's pay for work done before the VA decides.

But the rule protects the check, not the claim. The first claim is where the case gets built, and every review and appeal that follows starts from the evidence in that first claim. A lawyer can be paid to help fix a claim later. No lawyer can be paid to help get the claim right the first time.

The rule doesn't even stop veterans from paying for help. A whole industry of companies the VA hasn't authorized charges veterans for help with first claims, which is exactly the work a lawyer isn't allowed to charge for.

The system protects a veteran's money from lawyers, but not the veteran from a bad claim.

Nothing stops a lawyer from taking a first claim for free. The problem is paying for the work.

A veteran's file runs to thousands of pages of service records, medical records, and exam reports. Reading a file like that carefully takes a lawyer days. A firm that did days of unpaid work for every veteran wouldn't stay open.

So the rule alone doesn't keep lawyers out. The rule plus the cost of the work does.

But the cost has changed. AI can now read every page of a veteran's file, find every condition, connect each condition to the veteran's service, and draft the claim. Work that took days now takes hours.

Veterans don't need AI, though. They need a lawyer who has read every page of their file. AI is what lets a lawyer read every page for every veteran, not just a few.

So a lawyer can now take a veteran's first claim for free and still run a firm.

The rule says a lawyer can't charge for the first claim. With AI, a lawyer doesn't need to.

At Pete, we're building a firm where every veteran has a lawyer before their claim goes to the VA. The lawyer reads every page of the veteran's file, builds the claim, and makes every call, including telling the veteran when not to file. The first claim is free. If the veteran wants to challenge the VA's decision later, the same lawyer stays on the case.

We can't build Pete alone.

If you're a lawyer who wants to help veterans before the VA decides their claims instead of after, join us.

If you're an engineer who wants your work to help veterans get paid what they're owed, join us.

If you served, we want to hear from you. You know this system far better than we do.

Today, a veteran's pay depends on how well their claim was built. It should depend on what their service cost them.