How VA appeals turned out by representative type

The Board of Veterans' Appeals publishes every decision it issues. Our weekly cron bva-fetch-new ingests them into a searchable database. The appellant's representative is parsed from the REPRESENTATION caption that appears near the top of each pre-AMA decision.

The Appeals Modernization Act (AMA) took effect in 2019 and the published decision text format no longer prints the appellant's representative field. We index it for pre-AMA decisions only; an AMA-era source is planned for a future update.

The four largest national VSOs (DAV, VFW, American Legion, AMVETS) each have their own bucket. Attorneys and claims agents are pooled. State Veterans Affairs offices are pooled. Decisions with no REPRESENTATION block in the published text are counted as Pro Se (matches BVA convention; a small share may be parsing failures).

Most BVA appeals raise more than one issue. A single decision can grant one issue, deny another, and remand a third. We report the share of decisions where at least one issue received each outcome, rather than forcing every decision into a single bucket.

No. These are historical aggregate rates across hundreds of thousands of different appeals, decided by hundreds of different judges under different rules over more than two decades. Every individual claim turns on its own evidence and law. We publish these aggregates so you can see what has happened, not predict what will happen.