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Veterans Law Judge Joy A. McDonald

Issue-level outcome statistics computed from the full text of 10,479 public Board of Veterans' Appeals decisions signed by VLJ Joy A. McDonald in the corpus slice below.

Decisions parsed
10,479
Issues decided
20,522
Issues granted
13.6% (2,801)
Issues remanded
45.1% (9,256)
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
Granted2,80113.6%
Denied7,42436.2%
Remanded9,25645.1%
Dismissed8974.4%
Vacated1440.7%

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
Back and lumbar spine2,08714.9% (311/2,087)38.7% (808/2,087)43.7% (911/2,087)2.7% (57/2,087)
Knee1,47212.3% (181/1,472)37.7% (555/1,472)47.2% (695/1,472)2.8% (41/1,472)
Hearing loss1,42615.9% (227/1,426)45.4% (648/1,426)33.5% (478/1,426)5.1% (73/1,426)
Ankle and foot1,01212.4% (125/1,012)38.6% (391/1,012)45.3% (458/1,012)3.8% (38/1,012)
Psychiatric conditions89520.4% (183/895)37.0% (331/895)37.0% (331/895)5.6% (50/895)

Search every decision by VLJ Joy A. McDonald 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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