The letter is always polite.
It thanks you for your patience. It recites your claim number and lists the records it says were reviewed. It mentions, in the passive voice, that a physician consultant retained by the plan has completed a file review. And then, somewhere around the third paragraph, it explains that you no longer meet the definition of disability under the terms of your policy, and that benefits will terminate at the end of the month.
Ben Glass has read a great many of those letters. He has also spent the last three decades taking them apart.
Ben is a Fairfax, Virginia trial lawyer who represents people whose long-term disability and life insurance benefits have been denied, terminated, or quietly starved out — most of them professionals who did everything right. They bought the coverage. They paid the premiums, sometimes for twenty years. They kept working through pain longer than they should have. And then, when their bodies finally stopped cooperating, they discovered that the policy they were counting on came with an adversary attached.
He knows the playbook because he was handed a copy early.
Ben started practicing law in 1983, and his first job out of George Mason University School of Law was not on the side he's on now. He worked for three trial lawyers doing insurance defense — learning, from the inside, how claims get evaluated, how files get built, and how a company decides what a human being's future is worth. He didn't stay. But he never forgot the arithmetic, and he has been using it against the companies that taught it to him ever since.
He founded BenGlassLaw in 1995. Over the years the firm narrowed until only two things were left: serious injury cases in Virginia, and disability and life insurance claims nationwide. Narrowing was the point. Long-term disability litigation under ERISA — the federal statute that governs most employer-provided policies — is a strange and unforgiving arena, and it does not reward dabbling.
Here is what most people don't learn until it's nearly too late.
In a typical ERISA case there is no jury. There is often no live testimony at all. No cross-examination of the doctor the insurer hired, who reached a conclusion about you without ever laying eyes on you. When the case reaches federal court, the judge frequently reviews nothing but a paper record — and that record was largely assembled by the insurance company, during the administrative appeal, before the lawsuit was ever filed. If the evidence that proves your case isn't in that file by the time the appeal closes, in most cases it may never be heard.
Which means the fight is won or lost long before anyone walks into a courtroom. It is won in the months after the denial letter arrives, in the deliberate, unglamorous work of building a record the insurer cannot explain away: the treating physicians' opinions, the functional testing, the vocational evidence, the occupational realities of what the claimant actually did for a living, the internal inconsistencies in the insurer's own file. Ben's firm does that work first and litigates second, on the theory that the appeal is the trial.
He has also been willing to count. His firm reviewed years of ERISA long-term disability decisions in the Fourth Circuit and published what it found about how seldom claimants prevail — not as marketing, but because he believes people are entitled to know the odds before they decide how hard to fight. He has argued these appeals himself, in Richmond, before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and has won reversals for claimants whose plans failed to engage in anything resembling a reasoned decision-making process. He records oral arguments from federal appellate courts and publishes them on his podcast, ERISA Disability and Life Insurance Litigation, so that other lawyers — and any claimant curious enough to listen — can hear exactly how these cases actually sound.
Today the firm has more than $45 million in future disability benefits under management for its clients. Roughly 83% of its business arrives by referral from human beings — former clients, treating physicians, financial advisors, and other lawyers — rather than from advertising. Ben has been selected to Super Lawyers every year since 2006, named to Best Lawyers in America, and rated AV Preeminent by Martindale-Hubbell; BenGlassLaw has been voted the #1 Northern Virginia law firm in Virginia Living's Best of Virginia awards four years running.
He is also, and this matters to the work, an unusually whole person.
Ben grew up in Annandale, the oldest of seven. He captained the soccer team at Thomas Jefferson High School, won a regional championship, and played at William & Mary on scholarship. He has been refereeing youth and high school soccer for more than fifty years and still does, most weekends, in the same fields where he learned the game. His firm funds a scholarship for young referees and umpires, on the belief that teenagers who learn to make an unpopular call and stand behind it turn into adults worth knowing.
The title of his book Play Left Fullback comes from advice his father gave him as a kid: take the position nobody else wants, get on the team, and figure the rest out later. It is a reasonable description of a career spent on the plaintiff's side of insurance law.
He and his wife Sandi have nine children, four of them adopted from China, and seven grandchildren. He served for over a decade on the board of Love Without Boundaries, an international charity providing medical care, education, nutrition, and foster care to orphaned and vulnerable children.
In March 2024, Ben had triple bypass surgery. He talks about it publicly — the surgery, the recovery, the return to CrossFit — which is not the sort of thing lawyers usually put in a bio. He does it partly because his clients spend a great deal of their lives being told to be quiet about their bodies, to minimize, to not make it a thing. He is not interested in modeling that.
What he is interested in is the idea he calls Live Life Big: that a diagnosis, a denial letter, or a career that ended earlier than planned is not the end of an interesting life. Many of his clients arrive convinced that it is. A meaningful part of what he does is disagree with them, out loud, while the legal work proceeds.
"Every case win is a highlight," he says, "because we are changing lives."
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Practice Areas
Long-term disability insurance claims and appeals (ERISA and individual policies) · Life insurance benefit denials · Serious personal injury and wrongful death (Virginia)
Court Admissions
Supreme Court of Virginia · United States District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Virginia · United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
Selected Books
Play Left Fullback: How Challenging the Status Quo Will Help America's Solo and Small Firm Lawyers Build Better Practices, Be Heroes to their Families, and Restore America's Trust in Lawyers · No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs (with Dan S. Kennedy, Entrepreneur Press) · Renegade Lawyer Marketing · Great Legal Marketing · You, A Teenage Soccer Referee: The Guide to Success
Consumer guides: Don't Try This at Home: A Guide to Your Disability Insurance Appeal · Robbery Without a Gun: Why Your Employer's Long-Term Disability Policy is a Sham · Five Deadly Sins That Can Wreck Your Accident Case · The Truth About Lawyer Advertising
Podcasts
Host, ERISA Disability and Life Insurance Litigation · Host, The Renegade Lawyer Podcast · Guest on more than 100 shows, including the White Coat Investor Podcast, The Game Changing Attorney Podcast, and Inspired Insider
Teaching
Founder of Great Legal Marketing and the Ben Glass Center for Growth and Innovation, where lawyers from across the United States and Canada come to Fairfax to be trained by Ben and his team. He has lectured nationally on mastering ERISA long-term disability and life insurance claims, direct and cross-examination, the use of medical experts, proving damages, and legal ethics.
