Long before he founded a Houston disability firm, Marc Whitehead watched a decorated veteran prove the same thing over and over, and he never forgot what that did to a family.
Most of Marc Whitehead’s clients reach him the same way. A letter arrives. They open it, find the word “denied,” and decide it’s over. Then someone at his office explains that federal law builds in appeal rights for exactly this situation.
“You can hear it in their voice,” Whitehead says. “Something shifts.”
Whitehead founded Marc Whitehead & Associates in Houston in 1992, the same year he graduated from the University of Houston Law Center. For more than three decades the firm has represented people whose long-term disability, Social Security disability and veterans disability claims were turned down. This month that work earned him his 12th selection to the Texas Super Lawyers list. His first three came in 2013, 2014 and 2015. After a gap, he’s been on it every year since 2018.
He’s careful about how much weight he puts on it. “I’ll be the first to say an award isn’t a verdict, and nobody’s mortgage gets paid because my name is on a list,” he says. Still, this one landed differently. Disability appeals don’t produce big courtroom moments. An ERISA appeal is a stack of paper. A Social Security case is a hearing room with an administrative law judge, a vocational expert and a frightened client. A VA claim can sit for years. When an outside group looks at that work and calls it serious law, Whitehead thinks first of the case managers, the attorneys and the people answering the phone at 7 at night.
When the announcement went out, he put it simply: a denial does not necessarily have to be the end of someone’s story.
A House Full of Appointments
The reason he believes that goes back to his uncle. Whitehead grew up in his uncle’s household. The man was a disabled veteran, decorated in both World War II and the Korean War, and he didn’t talk much about what he’d been through.
“What I remember is the paperwork, the appointments, and that particular frustration of having to prove over and over that something was wrong when it was plain to anybody who lived with him,” Whitehead says.
As a kid he didn’t understand the legal machinery behind any of it. He understood what it did to a family. That stayed with him through Texas A&M, where he earned a B.B.A. in finance, and through law school in Houston, where he finished in the top quarter of his class. He opened his own firm the year he graduated.
A general civil practice would probably have looked like the safer bet. But disability appeals, insurance denials, Social Security and veterans claims felt to him like a continuation of what he’d already seen at home. What has kept him there is that the need doesn’t shrink. For someone who’s sick or hurt, a disability claim decides whether they can pay the mortgage or afford their medication. When a denial letter cuts off that income, they need someone who already knows the specific system standing in the way.
Three Rulebooks at Once
The hardest part of the early years was a challenge Whitehead chose. Rather than learn one system of disability law, he set out to learn three.
Long-term disability insurance mostly runs through ERISA, the federal law that governs employer-sponsored plans. Social Security disability has its own five-step evaluation. Veterans disability runs through the VA, with its own rating schedule and its own appeals lanes. None of them share a rulebook. An argument that wins a Social Security case can be irrelevant in an ERISA appeal, and VA math works on its own terms. A 50 percent rating and a 30 percent rating don’t add up to 80. They combine to something closer to 65.
“You don’t pick up ERISA’s deferential standard of review or the VA’s rating schedule in a semester,” he says.
The other obstacle has never gone away, because it’s built into how insurers handle claims. They hire investigators to film claimants outside their homes. They send people to an “independent” medical exam with a doctor the insurer chose and paid, then use that single office visit to contradict years of treatment notes. Conditions that are hard to measure, like chronic pain, fibromyalgia, depression and anxiety, take the worst of it because there’s no lab number to point to.
Whitehead’s answer has been patience and a thick file. In an ERISA case, once the appeal is denied, the record generally closes, and a federal judge is usually limited to what’s already in it. He has seen cases turn on one medical record that did or didn’t make it in before that window shut.
“So we build the record like we’re expecting the surveillance and the outside exam,” he says, “because most of the time, we are.”
Reading the Whole File
Most lawyers in this area pick one lane. Whitehead’s firm handles all three, and he says that changes how he reads a case. He can see when the same medical record will be read one way by an insurer and another way by an administrative law judge, and when a person may have rights under more than one system at once.
He’s also a trial lawyer by training, which surprises people. He is board certified in personal injury trial law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization and has tried more than 50 jury trials. He is also board certified in Social Security disability law and accredited by the Department of Veterans Affairs for veterans claims. He’s admitted in every federal district court in Texas, the Fifth Circuit and the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, which means he can follow a case wherever it has to go. Over the years he has handled more than 1,000 Social Security disability hearings.
The habit he works hardest to keep is reading the entire file before forming an opinion.
“Medical records describe treatment. They don’t describe what a person can and can’t do on a Tuesday afternoon at work,” he says. “The argument lives in the gap between those two things, and you can’t find it if you’ve already made up your mind.”
He also tells clients the discouraging parts up front. A denial at the initial Social Security stage is common and doesn’t mean a claim is weak, but reconsideration and a hearing can take a long time. Most Social Security awards nationally come at reconsideration or at a hearing, not on the first application. Whitehead would rather say that on day one than promise something quick. In his experience, claimants remember who told them the truth.
Some clients stay the course for years. One wrote in a review that she worked with the firm’s team for three years before her Social Security disability benefits were approved. Another described a long fight over a long-term disability denial in which Anthony Vessel, one of the firm’s attorneys, kept him informed the whole way. Whitehead values those reviews because they’re about the people in his office.
He keeps client stories general on purpose. People hand the firm their medical histories and their worst years, and he’d rather protect that than tell a better anecdote.
In Front of a Classroom
Whitehead has also taught Civil Trial Advocacy as an adjunct professor at the University of Houston Law Center, his alma mater, and has taught courses for the National Institute for Trial Advocacy and the National Business Institute.
“When you have to walk a room full of lawyers through the five-step Social Security test, from substantial gainful activity down to residual functional capacity, you find out fast which parts you only thought you understood,” he says.
He has served as president of the Houston Trial Lawyers Association, sat on the board of directors of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and chaired the Social Security Disability Section of the Houston Bar Association. He credits those roles with putting him in rooms with lawyers who were better than him at things he needed to learn. Alongside the Super Lawyers selections, he holds a 10.0 Superb rating on Avvo and has been included in The National Trial Lawyers Top 100. He says the certifications matter more to him than the awards, because they tell a claimant something concrete about what he’s been tested on.
He has also written guides on winning Social Security disability appeals and on veterans disability claims, and he puts out a newsletter on the same subjects. The aim is to reach people before they need a lawyer. If someone reads one and files an appeal on time with the right records, he counts that as a win, whether or not they ever hire the firm.
From the Heights to Everywhere Else
The firm that started in Houston is now headquartered at 403 Heights Boulevard, with offices around Texas in cities including Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso and Lubbock. It represents claimants nationwide, and Whitehead wants that reach to keep growing. The three disability systems are national, and as he puts it, the federal rules don’t care where a claimant lives. Someone in another state who just got a termination letter from an insurer has the same problem as someone in the Heights.
He plans to keep expanding the teaching and writing too. Most of the damage in an ERISA case happens early, in what does or doesn’t get into the record, and much of it is avoidable if people know what to look for.
Technology will play a part. Tools that organize a medical record or assemble an administrative record faster are useful in a practice where the window to add evidence is often the only one a client gets. But Whitehead is clear about their limits. Software can’t decide which piece of evidence an administrative law judge will find persuasive, or how to answer an insurer’s outside exam that contradicts ten years of treatment notes. That still takes someone who has read a lot of denial letters.
Longer term, he wants the firm to outlast him, and he wants to keep training lawyers who treat every file as though a real family stands behind it.
“Because there is,” he says. “After more than 30 years, that’s still what gets me to the office every morning.”
