Portal:Supreme Court of the United States

“ More fundamentally, the amount of past-due benefits that the agency can withhold for direct payment does not delimit the amount of fees that can be approved for representation before the agency or the court. The attorney might receive a direct payment out of past-due benefits, but that payment could be less than the fees to which the attorney is entitled. Indeed, prior to 1968, the statute allowed fees for agency representation but lacked a provision for direct payment of such fees from past-due benefits. ”

“ A claimant who has been denied benefits “in whole or in part” by the Social Security Administration may seek administrative review of the initial agency determination, §405 (b) , and may then seek judicial review of the resulting final agency decision, §405 (g) .
As presently written, the Social Security Act “discretely” addresses attorney’s fees for the administrative and judicial-review stages: “§406 (a) governs fees for representation in administrative proceedings; §406 (b) controls fees for representation in court.” ”

“ We “begi [n] with the language of the statute itself, and that is also where the inquiry should end, for the statute’s language is plain.” Puerto Rico v. Franklin Cal. Tax-Free Trust, 579 U. S. ___, ___ (2016) (slip op., at 9) (internal quotation marks omitted) . Under §406 (b) , when a court “renders a judgment favorable to a claimant... who was represented before the court by an attorney,” the court may award “a reasonable fee for such representation, not in excess of 25 percent of the total of the past-due benefits to which the claimant is entitled by reason of such judgment.” ”