they refer to work done only before the court the only representation discussed in section four of six b itself would also include work done before the agency which is subject to a separate award mechanism section four zero six a in this case your honour's the statutes text its structure its purposes and its history all confirm the section four zero six piece cap applies only to work done in court first the text section four of six be references explicitly and only work done in the court it's in single sentence it says whenever court renders a judgment favorable to a claimant who is represented before the court by an attorney the court may allow a reasonable fee for such representation the dictionary meaning of the word such of the sort previously mentioned confirms what is common sensical so does the doctrine of the canon of express the meus section four zero six eight by contrast speaks the work done before the commission claims under title two and title sixteen and it uses the words in the aggregate congress likewise knew how to create after offsets as it did in the equal access to justice that also your honors the structure of the act makes this clear it twenty five percent no justice ginsburg the agency has taken position which is not contested in this litigation that there is a separate twenty five percent pay cap which apply they will set aside the amount of i'm troubled by the idea of attorneys attempting to collect fees directly from their clients now i understand from the briefing that you can garnish disability benefits  if you don't get paid your percentage you can garnish disability benefits but how can you collect otherwise you don't collect over the fund that justice ginsburg use a scribing  don't you think the congress wouldn't have wanted social security recipients to be hounded by collection efforts will you on first want to correct what may be in this conception it is not the case that when the twenty five percent authorization cap is used up that attorneys if they want to recover fees beyond that would never be on the amount withheld would actually have to go against the claim get the money from the mouth of agencies still i understood here there was some money that you could have received so that i'm talking about the extreme possibility now where there's a small these your ward but you get fifty percent of the recovery are we going to have people garnishing something or a touching something that belongs to klein's not in most cases you are in most cases it makes no economic so i did not ask you about most cases so i'm asking about exceptions what there would be i mean there would be an exception your honor if i were representing bill gates say it would i could go after him for payment of the remaining most of the claimants or of course do not have much money in the statute and justice ginsburg says puts a twenty five percent cap on what on how it's going with the pool i guess from which it's going to be paid by the agency doesn't that suggest that congress thought that there would be an aggregate cap because a there is the pool cap and then it's just a sort of my worst says we don't expect warriors to go after claimants who by definition often can't work and often don't have much money well just as kavanagh the poor cap is imad is a creature of agency work not actually an artifact of what congress has done  so it's you cannot impute that actually to what congress what congress is feeling here was as you mention in most cases any of these cases the claimant will be judgment proof beyond now that the agency has set aside and in those money from he takes the fee out of that is that right the tourney has to effectively we return the lesser of the year so it is the amount from the client is less than the a j award the attorney gets the the greater amount returned the other to the client so the client doesn't pay ok anything perhaps if there is no e a j award or so take that out of the picture and you win this case there is yet another check that has to be a reasonable fee and the judge is in charge of that yes your part ok so he has to escape that but if it does escape that then the lawyer can get up to fifty percent that's the answer is that right the lawyer can be authorized to get yeah like that a lawyer can be authorized i mean i'm not trying to i'm just trying to get the thing straight in my mind you know you j p of the greater amount the judge doesn't say it's an unreasonable thing to do and the client has the money and then you could bring it up to fifty percent yes and your argument against that is that's like the no set unless gates happens to be on welfare which i think you do yes but it would make no sense for an attorney to waste his or her time pursuing such claim interests are contrary to your client's interest meaning your client that you're no circumstance should want the danger of paying more than a twenty five percent aggregate so shouldn't you have gotten a different player for her in some point in this litigation earlier than here no your honor our client has actually been notified every step e i don't believe that that was done in this case i am troubled by these disputes because i want often wonder if clients are being adequately represented once the dispute moves from the main case and into how much you're entitled to but in this case your honor not only was miss wood informed of what was happening but she consented to it not without being told of the potential con to get there to get more than twenty five percent not from social security benefits but some of your honor if there are no ija fees in the picture which would increase the size actively increase the size of the pot and the claimant can't pay any more money you would take your lumps and leave the lawyer at that point would swallow a loss in fees typically what happens there's no sense in wasting time trying to squeeze cap rule your honor is that attorneys will be less willing to take on these cases ex ante because they want to stand that in many cases they will not be getting fees for work in cork because of that pool will have date statistics are about forty percent to fifty percent somewhere in there so in about forty to fifty percent of the cases there will always be a particular thing and the twenty five percent yes your honor but that's what you're fighting for is that twenty five percent pool the statute itself you said it didn't come from the statute maybe i'm misreading something you know a four is a little bit unclear you want to a four talks not seen that very clear it says twenty five percent no it does say twenty five percent but it also says the maximum fee which is the technical term for the agency award the maximum fee is not a term from four six b is from four of six that pool established under a four is the only pool the justice ginsburg has been referencing that's the only p the wards as well the gang mr chief justice and may please the court there is one on one only one operator provision in this case in that section four six b one that provision applies when a claim is represented quote represented before the court fine attorney unquote and it authorizes a reasonable fee for such representation that provision clearly governs fees only for representation before the court and its twenty five percent past of benefits ca likewise only applies to fees for work done for court that text fully resolved this case the court has had a series of questions about kind of some of the practicalities i'd like to address first justice kavanagh's question about the pot there's two benefits so much of the maximum the as does not exceed twenty five percent the maximum fifi look throughout the prior provisions of a talk about the maximum fee that the commissioner approve for work before the agency so that a four provision mandates that so much of that maximum fee that is the agency fee as does not exceed twenty five percent shall be paid is mandatory now i think there's two things first is the mandatory the pot must be twenty five percent at least if the agency fee is that large and to the language so much of the agency fee is does not exceed emphasizes that congress understood that the agency  win would sometimes exceed twenty five percent of past due benefits which itself is incompatible with an aggregate twenty five different argument but different argument but while we're on a forethought i touch upon it the second provision is in the one that's on page eight it's in the latter half of the main paragraph that the secretary shall certify the amount of such be referring back to the court approved the four court work as does fees and the permissive obligation or the permission permissive authority to set aside its money for the court fee which itself is capped at twenty five percent as allowing it to only pay out twenty five percent right total right i understand that and it comes alternately from an interpretation of the statue maybe you're saying it's not mandated by the statute but it's an interpretation of the permissive part of the stare right that's what i mean by saying it's not maybe it's not mandated by the statute is so it's not so congress was in acting these provisions in any cap that might exist congress understood that it was authorizing the agency to withhold more than twenty five percent over the operation of these two there's another point to be made that i think we haven't focused on is that we've only been talking about attorney fees because this case involves an attorney but congress has authorized non attorneys to represent agency clients before the agency and in subsection of four six specifically directs the agency to extend the fee payment provisions the direct payment provisions that we're talking about mean for to non attorneys but in doing so congress in two unfortunately we didn't reproduce this in our brief but it's an easy to set forth perec was it's for these non attorney representatives to be eligible for this direct payment not all of them meet those eligible eligibility requirements so there is a category of cases that were never comes into play because there is no authority to provide direct payments to the to the representative now those representatives are still representing clients before the social security administration and they have to collect their fees or they wouldn't be doing it and i think that addresses just a sodomite your your concern it's baked into the system these representatives are going to collect sometimes the fees from the client of these in social security title two cases there's no there's no  ns testing so you can have a rich client going to the poor client but the porton point is that congress intended not only sometimes to get twenty five percent we're told by the amicus brief of the disability attorneys that almost never happens almost never happens that they would try to get the money directly from the clime now maybe that's not correct but that cannot be correct for the set of non attorney representatives that are not eligible for grech payment only way they can get their money is from the point also you look at the criminal probations in how often are the people family members or or that i i don't know but i do know that there are the criteria that congress is specified and or to just not contemplate that we're talking familial relationships you say there's no danger little danger of garnishment future benefits but you also say that sometimes the government permits garnishing to help attorneys satisfy awards under twenty five percent when they have missed out on withholding where do you get that authority from to permit garnishing order permit garnishing above the twenty five percent i can understand if it's not above the twenty five percent i think what you're talking about is in the circumstance that the agency for some reason we failed to withhold rightly five percent of past the benefits it recovers as an overpayment of past due benefits from the from from the future stream and this is not an uncommon event for instance sometimes there are over payments in either the title to or the title sixteen context to the claimant and the got the government will then offset from future payments to to recoup that money this is just another illustration of benefits well i don't think that first of all no one is questioning the government's authority where the government has already paid the money that should not have been repaid in in most contexts the government can recover money that is overpaid from individuals i don't find that to be particularly telling and there are regulatory provisions that govern that to make sure that the recoupment of this overpayment is not onerous but what i get to getting back to the question presented in this case i think it's  clear that congress contemplated if you look at a fall i which is the criminal prohibition for collecting in excess of the maximum the authorized by the commissioner or be to which is the criminal provision prohibiting collection of the fee beyond that authorized by the court by setting a criminal prove ition and setting the threshold you know beyond what's often rise congress completed that if it's under that authorization limit you could collect it and it's not an abuse of collection because the fees have been approved either might the agency under four six eight or under the court under for a six you know you obviously have a good argument i think the point is your brief then goes to great lengths to say don't worry about taking fifty percent from disability claimants because district courts want to allow that under the reason when it's prog and the disability attorneys say don't worry about that seemingly extreme fifty percent fee because that never really happens in practice both of which suggests that understand that but but the i think on the policy there are going to be cases where you're going to get greater than twenty five percent for instance there are cases where there's representation in overpayment cases we were just discussing or maybe you get in the result of an overpayment case you don't get past but the agency in the court may well approve a reasonable fee for payment in such cases there are other cases where disability the onset date is sufficiently late for instance new evidence came in and remit there's a five month waiting period for your eligibility eligible for benefits so it may be that even if you're found disabled in the proceeding i think the import of justice kavanagh's question is that in the usual case in which there are proceedings both at the commission and  district court and there are two twenty five percent caps it's not the government's position that in that usual case where lawyers can say well i won here and i won there that both of them are entitled to twenty five percent fees or that both of them should get twenty five percent fee is in the normal case where you got a substantial amount of pasti benefits we think that's not the case when they're small amounts of past due benefits if there's only say five thousand dollars a pass to benefits we're only we're talking about very small amounts of compensation for attorneys and it's important to recognize also that we're only talking about the past two benefits one first of a disability and what strikes me as is now troublesome about this and then you can add a court of appeals proceed into it and the possibility of seventy five percent fee is so you know could that possibly have been what congress wanted well i guess there's two points one congress was concerned not only about past the benefits but congress would have understood that for a disabled person particularly one who is permanently disabled ongoing future benefits which are untouched by this ties are protected and in fact they protected him under forty seven the second point is i think you raise the question of that seventy five percent the government's view is that the cap in be for a six b is twenty five percent for all of the court proceedings including appeals and there's multiple reasons for that we think the tax when read in light of dictionary eric is amenable that reading but if you took the opposite reading you could have four five six proceedings with multiple remains coming up to this court perhaps there's no way you can get more than one hundred percent of pasty benefits if there are five proceedings so that anomaly suggests that our reading of a twenty five percent aggregate cap for the judicial proceedings is what was intended by congress in four zero six b which would then suggest that normally although there's not always the case it's not always the case because sometimes agency fees can exceed twenty five percent of past benefits normally it should not exceed fifty percent and in many cases where the courts where you've got a lot of benefits as the court recognized and gives brecht the reasonableness criterion allows courts to police what your definition of smaller versus more substantial the used in response to  so i think it will depend on the amount of time and litigation spent on the case but would your money's coming right out of the claimants pocket it's coming out of the past to benefits that's right that's correct and so for in this case you know this case so unusual that a fifty percent chunk out of a claimants out of a party's pocket that that is true for many court cases although i don't believe it's unheard of the there are  depending on the reason i said unusual and in a lot of these cases when us understand these are all generally taken on contingency so and we're talking about low stakes and there's uncertainty about how many if any tested benefits even also low stakes for the attorney but it's high stakes for the claimant that is true but again there are two countervailing interests that congress is trying to address here one was excessive fees which i think will depend on the circumstances of the case what is excessive but the other is ensuring adequate representation for claimants that's an important element of this and if you if the cats if that's where i'm sort of belabor this but that's where the amicus briefs to say disability attorneys comes in because they say they usually agree not to take more than twenty five percent so i'm not sure how your point about the incentive structure actually fits what's going on in those airliners i think attorneys when there's not a cat the typical field remit that exists met caps out at twenty five percent of past the benefits both for the agency in that clearly don't need fifty percent to incentivize there are different the agreements both for the agency twenty five and for the court twenty five what was at issue here so if you were to look at the fia grievance that were signed by mr culbertson and the claimant in this case it actually would be a fifty percent fee that was agreed to so i think the what you may be been one could respond to some of these qualms about a fifty percent favor by saying don't worry it will never happen but you were specifically not saying that you were saying in a case where there proceedings at two different levels fifty percent fees is going to happen and it's going to happen in order to ensure representation at both of those levels it may well happen those fees would have to be determined to be reasonable but in that there is a well as an administrative check on that but yes if it is a reasonable fee in those circumstances sometimes it may well be twenty fifty percent and that isn't a set a necessary consequence of the of providing sufficient incentives that congress thought would be appropriate in this context to incentivize counsel both at the agency level and before the court thank you counsel thank you one that the agency is a gov't in and argued in favor of in the courts for half a century up until april of this year is that it imposes a twenty five percent aggregate cap on agency and court fees there are three primary reasons why this is the best interpretation of the statute first it is the most plausible reading when you take all of the amendments as a whole when you read it in the an order in the order of the end that many of the amendments and if you look at th multiple references with them to twenty five percent cap and if you look at the fact that the eye toward the purpose of the statute is to regulate attorneys fees in a fair manner to protect the benefits of the disabled with one twenty five percent withholding it is a reasonable possible interpretation and it is one second which the agency agreed with and devised a framework for the payment of these and the representation of claimants in the before the agency and before the court and they created this framework with as its know most notable feature this one twenty five percent cap which would make little sense if there was not an aggregate twenty five percent cap on pleasers one twenty five percent withholding and also third that capping these fees by twenty five percent balances what we know to be congresses and ten it was stated in one nine hundred sixty five in an acting the first twenty five percent cap they were concerned about the inordinate attorney's fees that were being collected when the when the court fees were not being regulated at the time the agency fees were regulated to twenty dollars or thirty dollars if you had to go before the appeals council but there was no cap on courtney's and they were concerned just thirty three percent but a third to a half of being paid to attorneys for having to take these cases to court if the climate's had been successful originally in the  even if passed to benefits i know future benefits are untouched and that's a sympathetic position but could a rational congress also think that there are some extraordinary cases that are hard and in order to incentivize attorneys more might be appropriate in order i mean if you overregulate you create scarcity right and if you over regulate the availability of attorneys nobody's going to take the case that is and so here isn't at least conceivable that a rational congress might think there would be an odd case that what you need above twenty five percent up to fifty but we're going to put in special checks a reasonable say in korea at the administrative level in a reasonable as inquiry at the district court all of which is subject to further review i'm sure so why why why is that an irrational scheme to and provide incentive structure so that people do have representation and that there isn't artificial scarcity this is not an irrational scheme to say they would have done it some other way they did it this way because this is the way that balance ok so your argument is that on the text you when it is a matter of policy you admit it's a drawl as a matter of policy there's never been any showing by anyone that there's a distance and have to take in cases because of  cumulative twenty five percent you admit a reasonable congress could worry about that scenario this congress did worry about the scenario they're getting more than twenty five percent and they had to balance because they wanted to make sure people were going to take these cases and as it turned out they do there's a very healthy social security bar we also have the egypt is to help protect attorneys and does this example an example but it might get more they work very hard long hours and they get the client disabled and as a result of that the client gets five thousand dollars it also gets up to as long as he lives and that's all future so the client eventually will get half a million dollars and so the lawyer says look i worked for four months and i know the past amount to only five thousand but when you look at what i got from my client it was half a million and i spent hours so please give me not just twelve hundred fifty twenty five hundred know and but have i have i'm i'm using that as an example in my mind as an example of where well this could be justified now do i have it right that's what i'm not certain about well if you look at the way my example right well your example probably isn't going to come out that there is four months way this really works is if you go before the agency and you when you get agency fees you can get up to twenty five percent you're probably not going to have been there for more than four six months maybe a year but you get the benefits that are accumulating over time it's sort of like passive money it's accumulating over time so it all adds up to fifty thousand or so if you match and so now we get twelve thousand five hundred and he would like twelve thousand more because he had to go to court and that took another two years and besides the client will not get fifty thousand he will get half a million because you know live for about ninety more years but what you have to take into account your honour's the fact that when is this is a tough statute for me i mean is this is if i got the example right well the examples right in terms of if you go before the agency and you lose you have to go to court that's what happens in all of these  we're just as far as getting at and i think it's a promise and my question to you is isn't it fair to say that a significant number of cases that future benefits are larger than past benefits there yes future benefits are but i disagree with the concept that you won't be hounded i do believe that there is definitely leeway in the statute and leo i am for a seven for claimants to be hounded after these past two benefits because for zero seven only allows only says you can't go after future benefits but fee resting on the fact that he got the client a million dollars but most of it's in the future he got the client who knows what's going to got something to happen and no i don't know what i'm getting at he did what he did for him then and i think maybe we should just be practical ok let's assume that there's twenty five percent of the judgment that wasn't paid out what do you think the lawyer can do to get that twenty five percent if he can't he can't go after the future benefits correct i don't believe that's necessarily true because the future benefits cannot be gone after but these are past due benefits so let's start there so you're saying yes he could potentially go after the pot of past few benefits to the excess that he wants is that right there is a twenty five percent withholding and that will be paid out if there is an additional twenty five percent of so warded to an attorney client ready have received a seventy five percent but he will that as the cases in the ninth and tenth circuits of suggested about going after the fees when there are over the twenty five percent withholding they have to find other ways to get them one way you can get them is saying they are past due benefits and they might have been put into your bank account they might have been put into your house but you can attach that because you would certified court or the agency certified them as p benefit so they are available and number two they could be considered to be wrongfully not withheld that's what happens when the agency allows you to go after future benefits now right now there's twenty five percent withholding so if you  did i think that may be wrong on your part because the agency is only authorized to withhold twenty five percent right so i don't think you can claim that they were wrongfully didn't withhold an additional twenty five percent so that's known as the agenc presuming also that that attorney could withhold documents from the client could do everything else a lawyer does when they're not paid to write and these are not typical clients these are clients are only are in this position because they were wrongfully withheld their benefits in the first place they should you're right your friend on the other side says that this just doesn't happen i know that these lawyers do not go after the recipients and you say that it's a real danger is how do we tell how do we tell who's right i mean i understand your point of view that theoretically this could happen but in the real world they said it doesn't well in the they're asking now to be able to be paid more than twenty five percent for a purpose it's not like they're saying we're going to saddle in every single case for just the twenty five percent that's what held obviously they're asking for the extra twenty five to be able to get it from the client sometimes the client will pay it we have presented the court with cases in the tenth ninth circuit where forty seven percent of the pastor benefits were awarded there is still just a twenty five percent withholding and they're not asking for a pyrrhic victory they're asking for the money and i think i take the point and indeed mr yang suggested that this happened and that it was meant to happen  but so that's troublesome but i'm struggling with your textual argument where does a come from let's discuss that because both the petitioner and the climate have said that the two words there are two words just entire statute that just make their position correct and then say that you get up to fifty percent a bit of fence and those two words are such representation in section b and i suggest your honour's that actually there's such representation before the court you have to see in the ne before the commission well their argument really has been pointing to the b language of such representation before the court make claim that that shows that you can get up to fifty percent of the pastor benefits but i would suggest to your honor's that actually supports a twenty five percent aggregate rule because what this statute provides is only you can get twenty up to twenty five percent of past up to not to definitely get twenty five but up to twenty five percent of pastor benefits for court representation if you're successful you cannot be successful unless there has been attorney representation somebody had to present the case before the agency they might have originally lost but if that case later won before the court two things happen number one the agency attorney who first represented them is going to get feet for what they did by presenting the case because all the evidence has to be presented to the agency it's not presented in court and number two most cases are sent back by the district court even when it is sent back by the district court honoree man for more evidence in this case for example they have looked at the district court judge or magistrate judge in this case said  i didn't really consider the case so i don't quite get the argument you know the stock representation language says twenty five percent for court representation and then you are saying that there is some kind of implicit exclusion as to another twenty five percent or however much it is for agency representation where does the exclusion come from i'm not actually arguing exclusion what i'm arguing is that in order to get a court you have to have an benefits were accruing the court attorney can't take credit or have some sort of responsibility for those fees it's sort of a fiction a legal fiction those are benefits work with this one actually to set up so that there are very specific sections governing agency proceedings and court proceedings so the statute is set up in a way that is not really consistent with that argument it seems to treat these as two different proceedings and it seems to treat fees or those two different  inquiries yes your honor and they are because of the way it works you can go before the agency and if you win you can get up to twenty five percent of the pastor benefits and you go home it's over if you go before the agency and you lose you don't get paid fee you go before the court and you can get up to twenty five percent if you win there may be agencies attorney might also be awarded the two or not it could be that they represent him pro bono could be that they were represented by themselves pro se it could be that the legal aid represented them you might only have a court fees so you have to have up to twenty five percent there too that's how it started there was already agencies he was taking care of so both of them have the up to twenty five percent because they're only might be in the end one attorney either the quarter charney or the agency attorney getting the fee but the question is what do you do when they both get fees and i tried to illustrate in the brief in terms of a timeline these fees are accruing over time the court attorney shouldn't be getting the fees that were occurring while it was before the agency and the agency attorney has no reason to be receiving the fees as they were accruing before the court it makes sense that they split them that is the only argument that that is  not an action that is not when he makes sense that they split them but you're not suggesting that there's any place in the statute that you can point to and say look that provision is the provision where congress indicates that it makes sense that they should put them i really have two arguments on that number one there are plain text argument is wrong and number two you can kind of get to to our position about the aggregate by reading the statute together with the amendments and the fact that there's one pool from which the the with benefits are withheld but to get to their plain reading their literal text they argue that the plain reading of the sad truth is while they're two to twenty five percent and they both that they can get up to fifty percent if you actually literally read the statute and you don't know anything about the background you don't know how it works you never read the regulations you would actually read a and they would say if you go before the agency and you lose you know if you go before the agency and you when you get paid if it's over with and they get benefits and you get paid if the benefits or other option to you go before the court and if you get a favorable judgment you will and that was the view that was adopted and that is actually the literal reading and it was the view that made form the basis of the single tribunals that was the six circuits rule they said well whichever form you wimmin that's where you get paid a fee that you can look and see if there was any work done in the other form but whatever form you went and you get a fee well nobody thinks that's right but that actually is the literal reading of the statute one or the other the only reason we're here is that we know that that's not how you read it you have to read the regulations that are incorporated into the statute in the way they work the fact that they both collect fees the fact that there's one withholding which really would make no sense the congress congress when they gave the delegation to the first board them secretary then the commissioner to establish regulations set up this framework and when they set up the framework it was all centered around the twenty five percent aggregate the they argued and constantly in cases before the court in favor and i've presented some of the language to your honor's in my brief  however that in one thousand nine hundred three they backtracked and said no that actually they've been flip flopping now they've never flip flopped over this the horn sing case that they cited in their brief about saying set different statutory maximum allowable fees and b was talking congress didn't think through the language the exact situation on the ground but i don't know what we're supposed to necessarily do with that what you do with that is what you say why did that happen because this is a piecemeal statute they started out with section b when the eighty's were pretty small and they came to be and they said we're having a problem here and or mentally large pieces we need to be able to rein those things in and we're going to balance the interests of the claima having excessive fees of thirty three to fifty percent of their benefits being paid out to attorneys fees with them paying them and making sure they get paid so that's key you can't make sure they're paid if you have one twenty five percent withholding but you're allowing thirty forty fifty percent that's no we're sure it's there and fact those so it seems to support your point it seems almost absurd that congress would have wanted litigation or actions by disability attorneys against disability claimants congress would not want that said the in the agri it's missing and the tax is a problem as you acknowledge but it might be possible that they didn't think they needed it because of the way they put forth all these statutes the way they kept putting in the twenty five percent cap and the way the agency had read it would have made the language i'm sorry you're the bear from the very beginning they had the twenty five percent withholding and twenty five percent cap what about the language that mr yang referred to in a four this is the language about payment in an amount equal to so much of the maximum fee as doesn't exceed twenty five percent of past due benefits which suggests that the maximum fee could be more than twenty five percent i actually think that language came from one thousand nine hundred ninety eight conference report and trying to understand what all this is you have to read all this legislative history and part of the legislative history was there was a discussion going on and the nineteen ninety two senate conference report when they were discussing the fact that the way the system was set up you would reason they were doing that is they were saying that the person ended up really not needing the s s i they were made as actively poor by the fact that we were paying them the disability originally so when we're  to determine attorney's fees we're going to reduce the amount of the past to benefit pool to be paid we're going to back out the s s i payment and then we're going to take twenty five percent of that that was the way the set up was and then they put in the new  disability benefits without reducing it they're still when we're going to pay and we saw only with hole in the twenty five percent so they're only going to be able to be paid that even though the going to be able to get an award now the  the probability of there be an award over twenty five percent of the past two amounts is one no past two amounts or ward correct because an attorney can receive a rea exactly are there any other situations in which the twenty five percent over twenty five percent could be in fact calculated government's making much of this congress contemplated it and i thought your brief said they contemplated it only in the two circumstances where there is no past to amounts well that's correct i mean the only time he would be getting benefits you need the only time is cases would come before without two passes without past due benefits being available to determine the twenty five percent out of would be overpayment and terminations cases i think it's very important to keep in mind when we are looking at that as a whole to determine what congress had intended in terms of who with we're talking about again these are claimants who had they originally gone before the agency and been awarded warded their benefits they would have had anything out of them they would have one hundred percent of their benefits awarded but now agency wrongfully it turns out they agree wrongfully deny them the benefits so the over a course  years these past two benefits are accruing this isn't nothing this isn't a small not exactly the hardest cases where you maybe are most in need of good legal services and lawyers might be the least likely to participate well that's a fortunate thing about twenty five percent does satisfy the attorneys and be the ija ward can be an excess of that you can make the claim whole and the attorney but you agree with the premise that these are the cases these are the hardest cases where attorneys are most useful perhaps well i think they're necessary to go into court you know i don't know necessarily the hardest cases but definitely lost below and that's it lost below they lost below another going to court and now they're going to court and my point being that had they not had to go to court had they not had to go to court had they been rightfully paid they would be paying any attorney's fees so a lot of people might think you know maybe the government ought to be better there are fees for that be reasonable judgment too but instead this is coming out of past you benefit so you have to determine and your honour's have to determine what to congress and ten when they were doing this when they put the statute out when we know they thought thirty three percent to fifty percent was inordinately high what did they actually intend to have happen with the agency and the agency determine that twenty percent was the maximum and the agency determined that that twenty five percent aggregate was what they would advocate in favor of and in fact if i could your honour's i found the brief where they wrote in dawson to explain their position which has been maintained for fifty years for half a century the most of the benefits provided for by the act are intended to supply a means of livelihood to persons who have been deprived of their ability to support themselves e g old age benefits for retirees and disability benefits for the disabled the majority of the claimants for benefits therefore depend upon them for a subsistence part of their livelihood and for most many of the benefits to their sole means of support often by the time passed to benefits are recovered from the secretary the climate is in dire financial need  third to a half of these benefits whatever the purpose can impose serious financial hardship on the claimant congress has sought to balance these needs against the out of the attorney by giving the court authority to fix that fee for the attorney when the court renders a judgment favorable to the claimant and by limiting the amount of that fee to a maximum of twenty five percent of the past two benefits it's plain therefore that the court's allowance of a fee and a social security case larger than an overall twenty five percent of past two benefits recovered would be contrary ensuring the claimant keeps as much of the back to award as possible and then later said quoted an eleventh circuit case cave vs out fellow and the same brief and this court that for a six b is designed to protect a particularly vulnerable class of claimants many claimants and social security benefit cases are miners that were incompetent to manage their affairs were disadvantaged by lack of education or physical or mental impairment so i think that this court and looking at what congress intended needs to look at what the commission had said for years because they were implementing they were the ones who were reading these statutory changes the amendment says they came along and they made it consistent always w consistently taking the position the twenty five percent of the past two benefits that had been occurring over the time the case was in court or before the agency was what would be congress intent congress the agency in the course of knitted together a system with a twenty five percent aggregate cap that has been working since one thousand nine hundred sixty five petitioner and respondents have urged this court to pull a thread on that system and to begin to unravel sets a reasonable fee there's no restriction on that the timeline problem that my friend mentions really no problem at all because it just wrecked this court instructed the lower court to take exactly that consideration into account in setting reasonable fees under four six and finally and horenstein all that was primarily a single tribunals case the sixth circuit on bach made clear that the single tribunal rule and the agric capital had to stand or fall together we asked this court to responsibility for which we are grateful the case is submitted