Home › BVA Decisions › Judges › D. Smart

Veterans Law Judge D. Smart

Issue-level outcome statistics computed from the full text of 3,398 public Board of Veterans' Appeals decisions signed by VLJ D. Smart in the corpus slice below.

Decisions parsed
3,398
Issues decided
9,440
Issues granted
19.1% (1,805)
Issues remanded
43.8% (4,135)
What this is computed from: 1,340,998 Board decisions (3,086,734 individual issues) dated 2007-06-01 to 2026-04-30, parsed from the public BVA decision archive at va.gov. Corpus ingest is in progress — the full 1992–2026 archive (~1.9M decisions) is being added, newest year first, so recent years are over-represented right now. Totals that blend all years therefore drift as older years land; the per-year table is the stable view. Rates are issue-level: one appeal often decides several issues, and the Board's own reporting cautions that per-decision rates overstate grant rates. 82,386 decisions our parser could not fully classify are excluded from rate math. Data build: 2026-08-28.

Disposition breakdown

DispositionIssuesShare
Granted1,80519.1%
Denied2,69928.6%
Remanded4,13543.8%
Dismissed7177.6%
Withdrawn740.8%
Vacated70.1%
Moot10.0%
Referred20.0%

Most-decided conditions

KneeBackAnkle FootRadiculopathyPsychiatric

Docket mix drives outcome rates: judges deciding more increased-rating appeals (where partial grants are common) will look different from judges deciding more service-connection appeals. Compare a judge against the Board-wide issue-level baseline before reading anything into a single rate.

Your appeal was decided by VLJ D. Smart?

Upload your decision letter — VetAid decodes each finding, flags examiner errors, and maps your HLR / Supplemental / CAVC deadlines. Free, built by a veteran.

Decode your decision letter →