08 Oct VSO – Veteran Service Organizations

Veteran Service Organizations also known as VSO’s, are organizations that help and offer services to veterans, their dependents and survivors.

Some of the services that they offer are to host fundraisers to help veterans, helping out homeless veterans, filing claims and any other form of aiding veterans/dependents/survivors. 

The biggest question asked is if these Veteran Service Organizations can do anything to help with legal representation for a veterans claim. They do in fact help in this field quite a lot.

A large portion of VSO’s have been started by veterans. These veterans have very identical lifestyles to the ones just leaving the military and they fully understand what you may be going through at the moment.

When it comes to what exactly these Veteran Service Organizations help with in the actual claims process, here’s what they do. They will be there every step of the way when preparing to form together the proper paperwork and documents needed, as well as during your hearing and making sure you are up to date with every date and time scheduled for your claims process.

These legal representatives that will be representing you are trained and educated and must pass an exam to be legally representing you, so do not worry if you believe they won’t be that effective because they truly are. Every step of the process will be broken down for you and made as simple as possible by these Veteran Service Officers.

The next question you may have is how expensive will this be and what are the costs for these types of services. Having a VSO to help represent you is actually not going to cost you anything. That is if there are no random fees that may occur that are not of the ordinary, but that’s nothing to worry over. You may be asking now why don’t others use a Veteran Service Officer to represent them instead of a VA legal attorney. 

The truth behind this is that VA legal attorneys do cost money if you are to win your claim, if you do not win then you are not paying anything. They do however have a much higher rate of success with helping veterans receive their benefits.

That being said, you must account for these factors when deciding to hire a VSO or using a disability law firm with specialized attorneys. To put it into perspective, in 2018, 52% of claims were awarded to claimants who did have legal representation. 

With either a Veteran Service Organization or a legal attorney, it is highly recommended to come prepared with one by your side.

If you are to file you claim and represent yourself you have a very high chance of not winning your claim your first time around. Both of these representatives are also very critical to have as sometimes veterans do come fully prepared with the required paperwork and their entire claim is delayed significantly.

A large portion of these Veteran Service Organizations are NPO’s (non profit organizations) and federally chartered. We understand how difficult it can be in the life of a veteran. Please reach out to the help you need as these veteran resources can help you more than you know.