After the plenary session with Bill Gray, I attended a breakout with Regional Chief ALJ Ollie Garmon (Region IV), Cliff Weisberg, John Heard and Gary Parvin. Just a few points to emphasize that expand on Mr. Gray’s presentation:
- Laptops are permitted in the hearing room–Judge Garmon. You won’t have any place to put them–Gary Parvin. (SSA monitor/keyboard takes up most of the available real estate.)
- When complete, e-Dib will be the world’s largest image database–storing information on the magnitude of 15 Libraries of Congress. The amount of information is measured in terabytes (trillions of bytes of information). The panel was not asked how long SSA would maintain these files or how SSA would deal with digital rot problems.
- The ALJ can annotate the SSA e-file on the network. Reps cannot. The CD we’ll get is read-only, at least for now. We will not have access to the eDib network, but SSA is working on the security issues to make it available later.
- Although there was little discussion of the technological changes we’ll need to make in our practices, John Heard said we would need the XP operating system, not Windows 98. The CDs run better on XP.
Editor’s Note: If you use Windows 2000, you don’t need to upgrade since XP is built on a W2K core. I have XP on my laptop and W2k on the office computers so I’ll test the CDs on both machines. Still, I can’t imagine there’d be a problem.
- We should be able to get CDs very soon after we file the Request for Hearing. We’ll get an updated CD the day of the hearing, a CD post-hearing that include the digital recording of the hearing, and CDs that we can request from time-to-time pre-hearing (reasonable requests only). CDs can be burned very quickly.
- It’s unclear whether the DO or DDS will burn CDs when a recon request is filed. Hard to see why they wouldn’t but Judge Garmon didn’t know if they would/could at this point.
- Cliff does not use the online 3368 (Disability Report). Bill Gray said they’re working on a new version of this, and Cliff is waiting for the new version. The current version takes his staff 2.5 hours to complete. He currently uses a merge form in office that takes minutes, not hours, to complete. So he’s sticking with paper for now.
- Judge Garmon prefers to be called "Dockie."
All for now.
