Marc WhiteheadMarc Whitehead

Marc Whitehead is the founding attorney of Marc Whitehead & Associates, a Houston-based law firm whose practice is disability claims.

The firm’s public identity is built around a single stage of those claims. Its site is called Disability Denials because the work concentrates on what happens after a claimant is told no.

What the firm does not do

Scope matters on a page like this, because a firm that claims everything is telling you nothing.

This is a benefits practice. It is not a personal injury practice, an estate planning practice, or a general litigation practice. The work is claims against agencies and insurers over income replacement and disability entitlements, and the depth comes from doing that repeatedly rather than from covering a wide field.

How Does He Approach a Disability Case?

By reading the file before forming a view of the claim.

That sounds unremarkable and it is not how most denied claims arrive. Claimants come in with a letter, a diagnosis, and a strong sense of injustice. What decides the case is none of those. It is a stack of documents assembled by other people, and until somebody has read it, everything said about the claim is speculation.

Start with the record the decision came from

Not the denial letter, which summarizes. The complete file, which explains: the reviewer’s assessment, the consultative examination report, the vocational analysis, and every record the agency or the insurer did and did not obtain.

The file usually shows something the letter does not. A treating source who was never contacted. An assessment built from three months of records covering a five-year condition. A vocational conclusion nobody questioned.

Find the single finding the case turns on

Every denial rests on one. A claim denied because a reviewer decided you can still do sedentary work is a different problem from a claim denied because your insured status lapsed, and both are different from a claim denied because a form came back late.

Answering the wrong one is the most common way a claimant spends their entire appeal window and arrives exactly where they started.

Close the gap between what records say and what decisions need

This is where most of the work sits.

Medical records describe treatment. They record what was diagnosed, what was prescribed, and what the patient reported. Decisions turn on something records almost never contain: how long a person can sit before they have to stand, how much they can lift repeatedly rather than once, whether they can hold attention through an afternoon, and how many days a month they would fail to show up.

A doctor who fully supports a claim and has never been asked those questions has produced a file that cannot win. The fix is not more records. It is a different document, and asking for it properly is a skill.

Treat the deadline as the fixed point

Evidence can be developed. An assessment can be challenged. A vocational conclusion can be taken apart. The date on the letter is the one element of a disability claim that cannot be repaired afterward, which is why it drives the sequence of everything else.

What Is Different About Each of the Three Systems?

Enough that treating them alike is one of the more expensive mistakes a claimant can make.

Social Security disability

The decision-maker is a federal agency applying a five-step test. The first two decisions are made from paper by people who never meet the claimant. Nobody meets you until the hearing, which is typically the longest wait in the process and the first stage where testimony counts.

The characteristic problem is a file that describes treatment and never describes limitation. The characteristic fix is a treating-source statement written in the vocabulary the agency decides in.

Long-term disability insurance

The decision-maker is an insurer or a plan administrator, and for employer-sponsored coverage the governing law is usually federal rather than state.

The characteristic problem is procedural rather than medical: the internal appeal generally has to be completed first, under 29 C.F.R. § 2560.503-1, and the record closes when it does. Evidence gathered afterward is usually too late, which is the opposite of what most people expect from litigation. Everything therefore has to go in before that door shuts.

VA disability

A separate adjudication system with its own evidence rules, its own rating schedule, and its own review options. Nothing carries over from a Social Security decision or an insurance decision in either direction, and a claimant who assumes otherwise plans the wrong case.

Why Denials Rather Than Applications?

Because the denial stage is where the outcome is still genuinely open and where most claimants are least equipped to act.

A person who has just been denied is unwell, short of money, and holding a document written in administrative language that reads like a judgment about whether they are telling the truth. It is not that. It is a finding about what a file proved.

Understanding the difference between those two things changes what happens next. So does knowing that the finding rests on evidence that can still be produced, and that there is a specific number of days left to produce it.

Writing and Public Explanation

The firm publishes a substantial library of explanatory material on disability claims, and that material exists for a practical reason. Most of what goes wrong in these claims goes wrong before anyone speaks to a lawyer, at the point where a claimant is filling in a form or answering a question without knowing what the answer will be used for.

Recurring subjects include:

• What the five-step sequential evaluation actually asks, and where in it most claims fail
• Why a physician’s opinion that a patient is disabled carries little weight, and what a useful medical opinion contains instead
• How vocational testimony decides claims at the last two steps
• The difference between an insurance denial governed by federal benefits law and a Social Security denial, and why conflating them is costly
• Deadlines, and the fact that they are shorter than they appear

Where to Go Next

If you are looking for information about a specific claim rather than about the firm, these are the starting points.

Social Security disability. Our Social Security disability practice page covers SSDI and SSI, the five-step test, the appeal ladder, and the deadlines that attach to each stage.

Long-term disability insurance. Our long-term disability practice page covers group and individual policies, and the difference federal benefits law makes to a claim.

VA disability. Our page on VA disability practice explains how that system works and what the review paths are.

Questions About the Firm

Who is Marc Whitehead?

Marc Whitehead is the founding attorney of Marc Whitehead & Associates, a Houston law firm that represents disability claimants. The firm’s work is concentrated on claims that have already been denied, in Social Security disability and in long-term disability insurance.

Where is the firm located?

The firm is based in Houston, Texas. Disability claims are largely documentary, so most of the work happens without anyone traveling: records and appeals move electronically, consultations happen by phone, and Social Security hearings are frequently held by video or telephone.

Does the firm handle claims outside Texas?

Yes. Social Security disability is federal law, applied identically in every state, and long-term disability claims governed by federal benefits law are similarly national in character. The location of the claimant is rarely what determines how the work is done.

Does the firm take cases that have already been denied more than once?

That is the core of the practice. A claim denied at the application stage and again at reconsideration has usually not yet reached the stage where anyone actually meets the claimant, which is the hearing. Two paper reviews by the same agency are not two independent verdicts.

What kinds of medical conditions come up most?

Conditions without a definitive objective test appear disproportionately, because they are the ones insurers and adjudicators dispute: fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, migraine disorders, neuropathy, chronic pain, long COVID, and mental health conditions. These claims are provable, and they require a record built from treatment history and functional detail rather than from a single image or lab value.

What does representation cost?

Social Security disability work is contingent, and any fee is drawn from past-due benefits after the Social Security Administration approves the amount. The agency sets the ceiling under its published fee rules. Long-term disability matters are also generally handled on a contingency basis, though the arrangement differs because the claims and the recoveries work differently.

How do I reach the firm?

Ask for a review. The initial look at a claim or a denial letter costs nothing.

The Document Nobody Read

Most people arrive at a disability lawyer believing the argument is about whether they are really unable to work.

It almost never is. The argument is about a file, assembled from records that describe treatment rather than capacity, reviewed by someone who has never met them, against a legal standard nobody explained.

That is a solvable problem, and it stays solvable right up until a date printed on a letter.

Marc Whitehead & Associates, Houston, Texas.

Our Main Houston Office
403 Heights Blvd
Houston, TX 77007
(713) 929-2856