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Veterans Law Judge J. M. Estes

Issue-level outcome statistics computed from the full text of 422 public Board of Veterans' Appeals decisions signed by VLJ J. M. Estes in the corpus slice below.

Decisions parsed
422
Issues decided
815
Issues granted
23.8% (194)
Issues remanded
31.2% (254)
What this is computed from: 1,929,585 Board decisions (4,382,791 individual issues) dated 1992-03-30 to 2026-07-31, parsed from the public BVA decision archive at va.gov. Every archive year 1992–2025 is complete. 2026 is partial: decisions dated through 2026-07-31 are in, and newer ones are added as the Board publishes them. Years follow the Board's archive folders; some older decisions carry no decision date and are counted under their archive year (see the dataset coverage table). Rates are issue-level: one appeal often decides several issues, so counting a whole decision as a grant when any one issue was granted would overstate grant rates. 23,206 decisions our parser could not fully classify are excluded from rate math. Data build: 2026-10-05.

Disposition breakdown

DispositionIssuesShare
Granted19423.8%
Denied20525.2%
Remanded25431.2%
Dismissed15218.7%
Withdrawn50.6%
Vacated30.4%
Moot20.2%

Every count here opens the decisions behind it in the Board decision finder: same issues, same counting, with links to each decision on va.gov and a CSV.

Most-decided conditions

ConditionIssuesGrantedDeniedRemandedDismissed / other
Knee6627.3% (18/66)21.2% (14/66)31.8% (21/66)19.7% (13/66)
Back and lumbar spine6621.2% (14/66)15.2% (10/66)50.0% (33/66)13.6% (9/66)
PTSD5119.6% (10/51)45.1% (23/51)21.6% (11/51)13.7% (7/51)
Psychiatric conditions4630.4% (14/46)15.2% (7/46)34.8% (16/46)19.6% (9/46)
Hearing loss456.7% (3/45)51.1% (23/45)24.4% (11/45)17.8% (8/45)

Search every decision by VLJ J. M. Estes by condition, outcome, years or evidence.

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.

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