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TBI: From Board Denial to Court Reversal

The two-step reality of a tbi appeal: what the Board does with these issues, and — when veterans appeal a denial to the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims — the arguments that get Board denials set aside.

What this is computed from: 30,584 decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, identified inside a 39,330-document public court-decision corpus and summarized by machine analysis. Every docket number shown below was verified to appear in the court's published decision text in that corpus (112 verified; 0 candidate examples were dropped for failing verification). Selection effect: only Board decisions a veteran chose to appeal reach the Court — most Board denials are never appealed, so these rates describe appealed cases, not all denials. Data build: 2026-08-16.

Step 1 — TBI at the Board

From our issue-level parse of 18,313 public Board decisions (dated 2026-01-02 to 2026-03-02; corpus ingest in progress):

Issues decided
248
Granted
19.4%
Denied
33.5%
Remanded
32.7%

Full Board-level tables: outcome rates by condition · judge statistics.

Step 2 — appealed denials at the Court

CAVC cases analyzed involving tbi
973
Board decision disturbed
51.8% (504)

Arguments that won — verified dockets

CAVC docket 17-4076 · verified · denial type: credibility

Board failed to provide an adequate statement of reasons or bases for rejecting favorable lay evidence and a private medical statement.

CAVC docket 00-1014 · verified · denial type: unclassified

Board decision pre-dates VCAA enactment

CAVC docket 15-1910 · verified · denial type: cue

The Board erred in finding a later Board decision subsumed an earlier RO decision when the later decision did not affirm the earlier one on the same factual basis.

CAVC docket 21-1370 · verified · denial type: no nexus

VA nexus opinion was inadequate for applying too high an evidentiary burden and failing to discuss individual circumstances

Argument summaries are machine-extracted from the cited public court decisions and lightly compressed; read the full decision by searching the docket number at CourtListener or the Court's own public search. A cited argument working in one record does not guarantee it fits another.

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