Tom Krause, NOSSCR Litigation Director

This is the story of how I became NOSSCR’s Litigation Director. As the Grateful Dead said, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”[1]

I started working for the Legal Services Corp. of Iowa (LSCI) on November 29, 1982. There were no computers in the office, but lots of books. You know, lots of pieces of paper bound together with leather covers.

I took three weeks off for an Iowa bar review course where I met a guy named Ray Cebula, who was starting in our Mason City office.[2] After that, I took the Iowa Bar – 2 1/2 days, all essay questions, and graded immediately. We finished the bar exam at noon on Wednesday, learned the results on Thursday evening, and were admitted on Friday morning. I’ve heard the bar exam has changed a little since then.

I first learned about Social Security Disability benefits at Legal Services. One of my first assignments was to help draft the brief in Baugus v. Sec’y of Health & Hum. Servs.[3] I drafted one small part of the brief and can’t remember my issue. Fortunately, Chief Judge Donald Lay and Judge Richard Arnold, two excellent judges friendly to our clients, were on the panel. They reversed the ALJ’s decision and awarded benefits.

This was an exciting time to learn Social Security law. To put everything in context, this was the height of the Reagan Administration’s efforts to cut off as many disability claimants as possible.[4] In 1982, the Eighth Circuit ruled the Secretary of Health and Human Services did not exceed his statutory authority in issuing the Medical-Vocational guidelines (the Grids), including a provision limiting the duty to call a vocational expert.[5] Congress passed the Social Security Disability Benefits Reform Act of 1984,[6] establishing the Medical Improvement Standard for Continuing Disability Reviews and requiring SSA to consider pain as a factor in determining disability. Later that year, the Eighth Circuit decided Polaski v. Heckler.[7] The Polaski decision defined the pain standard in the Eighth Circuit and was cited in virtually every ALJ decision for the next 30+ years. In 1986, the Supreme Court decided Bowen v. City of New York,[8] outlining the requirements for class actions against Social Security. There was a lot to learn!

One day, I was looking around our library. I don’t remember what I was looking for, but I remember what I found – a 3-ring binder with copies of the NOSSCR Forum. I had never heard of NOSSCR, but the articles looked interesting. I should note that our program had one subscription to the Forum. Our Central Office photocopied the Forum every month and mailed out copies to the 10 Regional Offices. Every month, our secretary circulated the latest copy of the Forum, then punched holes in it and put it in the binder. I read every issue from cover to cover.

A few years later, LSCI’s Social Security Task Force met in Des Moines. A private attorney named Bob Pratt gave an articulate, knowledgeable, moving, and insightful presentation. And he spoke of the virtues of NOSSCR membership![9] I wanted to join NOSSCR, but it was too expensive for our legal services group (and, at that time, NOSSCR did not offer a reduced rate for non-profit members).

Fast forward a few more years to 1995. I left LSCI and went into private practice. One of the first things I did was join NOSSCR as a Sustaining Member. My first NOSSCR conference was amazing! I had never been to a conference like that and had never been to Seattle!

While in private practice, I litigated and settled a class action against the Iowa Disability Determination Services (DDS) that I had filed before leaving LSCI.[10] I also filed a similar class action against the Nebraska DDS.[11] A young attorney from Gateway Legal Services came up to see me and talk about those class actions. That’s when I first met David Camp. More about that later.

I became a fervent NOSSCR supporter, attended many NOSSCR conferences, spoke at many NOSSCR conferences, and served on the NOSSCR Board for eight years. When I left private practice in 2018 to work for the Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services (SMRLS), I maintained my NOSSCR Sustaining Membership. I was happy working at SMRLS and thought I would remain there until I retired.

Then a funny thing happened. In late 2023, David Camp,[12] the young attorney I had met 20 years earlier, called me about becoming the first NOSSCR Litigation Director. My response was, “When do I start?”

Since then, I have worked on a lot of interesting issues, though the new Commissioner’s willingness to adopt many important reforms has taken some of the wind out of the litigation side of the position. Still, I have worked on DOT/vocational issues, fraudulent consultative examinations, CIOX/MRO medical records issues, trainings, and much more. Most recently, we filed a complaint against a vocational expert alleging fraud or similar fault. My “Holy Grail” is to litigate two class actions; one would challenge SSA’s use of the DOT and the second would challenge DDSs’ evaluation of subjective symptoms and assessment of residual function capacity.

Watch the Forum for updates on these issues and others that will affect your practice and your clients. And remember, “Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”[13]

---

[1]    Grateful Dead, Truckin’, American Beauty (Warner Bros. Records, 1970). The name “Grateful Dead” was taken from a reference to the Egyptian Book of the Dead but has a corollary in Medieval Christian theology. C. Dickey, The Indebted Dead: Tracing the history of the Grateful Dead folktale and the evolving obligations of being alive, Lapham’s Quarterly (June 29, 2020) (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/indebted-dead).

[2]    Ray works for Cornell University’s Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability. He frequently presents on Return-to-Work and Overpayment issues, including at the 2024 NOSSCR Conference in Nashville and NOSSCR’s August 21-22 Overpayments training.

[3]   Baugus v. Sec’y of Health & Hum. Servs., 717 F.2d 443 (8th Cir. 1983) (An ALJ’s hypothetical question to a vocational expert is a properly phrased hypothetical if it includes all the plaintiff’s relevant impairments and limitations which the ALJ found credible).

[4]   See, e.g., Chambers, D. E. (1985). The Reagan Administration’s Welfare Retrenchment Policy: Terminating Social Security Benefits for the Disabled. Review of Policy Research, 5(2), 230-240 (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-1338.1985.tb00353.x).

[5]   McCoy v. Schweiker, 683 F.2d 1138 (8th Cir. 1982) (en banc); see Heckler v. Campbell, 461 U.S. 458 (1983).

[6]   Pub. L. 98-460, 98 Stat. 1794 (1984).

[7]   Polaski v. Heckler, 739 F.2d 1320 (8th Cir. 1984) (subsequent history omitted).

[8]   Bowen v. City of New York, 476 U.S. 467 (1986).

[9]   Bob Pratt went on to become U.S. District Judge Robert W. Pratt of the Southern District of Iowa. See Krause, Honoring the Career of Senior District Judge Robert Pratt, NOSSCR Forum(June 2024).

[10]   See Laird v. Stilwill, 982 F. Supp. 1345 (N.D. Iowa 1997); Laird v. Stilwill, 969 F. Supp. 1167 (N.D. Iowa 1997); Laird v. Ramirez, 884 F. Supp. 1265 (N.D. Iowa 1995).

[11]   See Surrell v. Willman, 16 F. Supp. 2d 1085 (D. Neb. 1998).

[12]   At the time, David was NOSSCR’s Interim Director. He is now our Executive Director.

[13] Grateful Dead, Scarlet Begonias, Live from the Mars Hotel (Grateful Dead Records, 1974).