Veterans Law Judge Robert E. O’Brien
Issue-level outcome statistics computed from the full text of 87 public
Board of Veterans' Appeals decisions signed by VLJ Robert E. O’Brien in the corpus slice below.
What this is computed from: 1,806,710 Board decisions
(3,754,685 individual issues) dated 1996-01-11 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.
172,130 decisions our parser could not fully classify are excluded from rate math.
Data build: 2026-09-01.
Disposition breakdown
| Disposition | Issues | Share |
|---|
| Granted | 17 | 12.3% |
| Denied | 82 | 59.4% |
| Remanded | 37 | 26.8% |
| Dismissed | 2 | 1.4% |
Most-decided conditions
KneeBackPsychiatricHearing LossAnkle Foot
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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