Attorney Sara J. Frankel is a former Social Security Administration staff attorney at the Office of Hearings and Appeals, and therefore knows how the process works from an inside perspective. For more than 25 years, she has been specializing in the practice of Social Security Disability Insurance Benefits (SSDI) and Supplementary Security Income Disability Benefits (SSID) law. Attorney Frankel graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1988. She earned her Juris Doctor from the New England School of Law (New England Law), Boston, Massachusetts, in 1991. Attorney Frankel attended law school with the intention of pursuing a career in public interest law. She became interested in the area of disability and the law while writing her Juris Doctor thesis concerning mentally challenged persons becoming involved with the criminal justice system. While working at the Social Security Administration she saw many claimants struggling to traverse the complicated disability application and appeals process without legal representation. She realized that there was both a lack of and tremendous need for well trained and knowledgeable disability claimants’ representatives. She opened her private practice specializing in Social Security Disability Law in February 1996, which she thereafter expanded to include immigration law matters.