On the matter of my legal career

Long overdue update.

This is a place I call Jackson Acres. It’s my home in West Virginia, for a little over a year now. It’s been an incredibly eventful year in my life. I haven’t truly been settled down by any stretch of the imagination, spending on balance less than half of the past year actually present locally; the rest, travel, covering again over 20 states this year including number fifty for me, Alaska. My father passed away this year at 80 years old, after imparting one strange piece of advice: To quit my job.

And it’s been a journey. To be really candid, I’ve been a little burnt out for a while. My work of helping people navigate the Social Security system is chronically heartbreaking. On average I have to talk someone through a benefit denial once a week or so. Almost half of hearings are followed with that conversation, as are more than half of decisions at every other level of the process. Fifty or so times a year, I repeat a heartbreaking conversation that I still haven’t really developed a script for. I remember the weirdly pathetic pep talk I got from my trainer in my first losing hearing, full confidence we would get it on the appeal. And we actually did. We usually do, eventually. But sometimes we don’t and I have to have the same depressing conversation over and over again with the same person. It got exhausting. And my dad, my boomer dad who always talked about putting yourself last, self sacrifice, he’s the one who told me you need to quit this, for your mental health.

So I tried. Kind of. See, I can’t quit the reason. There is something at the core of this work that can’t be let go of. There’s a reason I became a lawyer in the first place. That isn’t gone, or even fulfilled. When I was a teenager I met a girl who was disabled because of a birth injury. I had a childhood friend who had the same birth injury, but corrected with a simple surgery and he lived a normal life. This girl was born in a crappy hospital with Medicaid, and didn’t get that kind of care. I’ve never had that extreme a case in my disability practice because those cases don’t need lawyers for SSI, and by the time I got this license it was too late to sue anyone for her. But she made me want to fight. She made me angry and she made me believe that what the universe gave me was entrusted to me for a purpose, to fight for them, for all the people who have nobody to fight for them. She was when I said “my job is going to be to fight for people against an unjust system” and I stopped along the way to do social security because I stumbled upon it. You may have heard me tell the starfish on the beach story about why I do that. But now I’m looking for a bulldozer because I can’t stay on the same beach for fifteen years.

I have referred out the majority of my disability practice and have started work on what’s next. It has come to my attention that there are a lot of other Americans who need the kind of help that I can provide in navigating this heinously broken system all around us. I have to take a break to do some self care and to straighten out some paperwork – get my local license – but I’ve got a lot of work to do. And it’s going to be done. James Ratchford Law is moving to Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. This house, Jackson Acres. And we are going to stop dicking around with social media and start picking at the actual problem. It’s time to get to work in 2024.