Disability Heroes

Tracey Pate founded Disability Associates in 2005 and has spent more than two decades representing Social Security disability claimants. She started as a law clerk to an administrative law judge, which taught her the thing that still shapes how she practices: judges are human, and cases are won on paper long before anyone walks into a hearing room.

She left the high-volume firm model to build a boutique practice, hires for emotional intelligence over administrative skill, and told us she will never retire. By the end of this conversation you will understand why.

Tracey Pate is founder of Disability Associates in Baltimore, Maryland.

In this conversation:

• Judges Are Human: what a clerkship taught her about how cases are actually decided
• Leaving the Factory: walking away from high-volume work to build something smaller
• The Wingman: building a practice around one person she trusts completely
• Clients Like Family: why she hires for emotional intelligence over administrative skill
• Leaning Into AI: what she has actually changed in the firm, and what she has not
• Make a Decision: the best advice she ever got, from the judge she clerked for
• Lightning round

"The hearing is the icing on the cake, but the hard work and preparation should be done well ahead of time."

"If I had waited until all the stars perfectly aligned, I probably never would have done it."

This conversation was lightly edited for clarity and never for message.

Tracey's firm: Disability Associates

Join more conversations like this one by RSVPing for a Chronicle event.

Disability Heroes is produced by Chronicle, ERE monitoring software for Social Security disability firms. See a demo.

• (00:00) - Judges Are Human

Diane Haar was a war crimes litigator when a catastrophic accident nearly ended her life. She was denied the medical evacuation she had paid for. She came out of recovery knowing disability law was where she had to be.

She founded Hawaii Disability Legal Services in 2012 and represents claimants across Hawaii, the Pacific Territories, and the Philippines, most of whom find her by word of mouth. She still sits in homeless shelters doing applications herself, and she bootstrapped a paperless firm by coding her own case management system before she could afford to buy one. When we called her a systems thinker, she corrected us.

Diane Haar is founder of Hawaii Disability Legal Services in Honolulu, Hawaii.

In this conversation:

• The Person: her sister, the accident, the denied evacuation, and why she still does applications in homeless shelters herself
• The Bootstrap + Book of Business: starting with no loans and banker boxes, coding her own case management system, and how word of mouth reached the Philippines
• Survivor, Systems & AI: the solo years, what she automates now, and where AI breaks down on a brief
• Build It or Buy It: when to build your own tools and when to stop
• Takeaways: what she tells people starting out

"What I actually am is a survivor."

"They don't need the shiny fancy office. They need you to win their case."

This conversation was lightly edited for clarity and never for message.

Diane's firm: Hawaii Disability Legal Services

Join more conversations like this one by RSVPing for a Chronicle event.

Disability Heroes is produced by Chronicle, ERE monitoring software for Social Security disability firms. See a demo.

• (00:00) - Why Disability Law Found Her

Chronicle builds software for disability practices, and for the last year we have been running rooms for the people doing the work: workshops, live trainings, and a monthly roundtable where practitioners talk about how they actually run their firms.

The software and the community were never two separate projects.

What kept happening in those rooms is that somebody would describe how they solved something, and a dozen other people would realize they had been fighting the same thing alone. So we started recording it. One guest, one practice, an hour at a time.

The pattern showed up fast:

• Almost nobody planned to go into disability law
• Everyone carries one case they still think about
• All of them hit the same wall: practicing law and running a firm are two different jobs, and nobody trains you for the second one

These conversations belong somewhere permanent, so a rep three years in can hear how somebody thirty years in actually does it, and so a client can see exactly who is on the other side of their claim.

New conversations every two weeks. Follow the show wherever you listen.

Tell us what you want asked, and if you are a practitioner with a story to share, we want to hear from you: www.chroniclelegal.com/podcast.

Disability Heroes is produced by Chronicle, ERE monitoring software for Social Security disability firms. See a demo.