Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:01 — 121.3MB) | Embed
Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More
He was 41 years old litigator who just made partner at his firm. His career was on the ascent. Then, out of no where, he suffered a massive stroke.
He survived. But the left side of his face was partially paralyzed, and his speech — the tool on which his entire legal career depended — was slow and hard to follow. How clients defected. And plying his trade in the courtroom was no longer a realistic option.
“He spent all this time, energy and money going through law school, passing the bar, becoming a lawyer, becoming a partner at a young age — and boom, it was all taken away.”— Mike Cogdall, President, Income Protection Solutions
In this episode of the Income Protection Journal Podcast, Mike Cogdall who has has decades of experience on the carrier side of the disability insurance industry, talks about this attorney, who he at a golf course years after his career ending stroke. And while their conversation was brief, the detail Cogdall remembers is this. Since the attorney had an individual disability insurance policy with own occupation coverage, it was still paying him a monthly benefit that would continue until age 65.
The policy didn’t give him his career back. But it meant that a single neurological event, arriving without warning in the middle of a successful professional life, did not also become a financial catastrophe.
What Own Occupation for Lawyers Actually Means
For attorneys and other legal professionals, the definition of disability inside an insurance policy is much more than a technicality. It is what they’re buying
In the reality, disability isn’t binary. It isn’t about if you can work, or you can’t. Own occupation disability insurance asks something more precise:
Own occupation coverages determines whether you can perform the substantial material duties of your specific occupation. Not any occupation you might be capable of filling. The one you actually trained for and practice.
Cogdall describes the distinction this way: a litigating attorney earns income through oral argument, client relationships, and courtroom presence. Those are the material duties of that occupation. The ability to research case law or review documents is not a substitute. Under a true own occupation disability insurance policy, a lawyer who can no longer perform those core functions has a legitimate disability claim — even if they are technically capable of doing other work.
“If you can’t do your profession, you’re covered,” Cogdall says. The attorney in his story could have retrained, moved into a transactional practice, or taken on work that didn’t require oral advocacy. Under own occupation terms, none of that extinguishes the claim.
Group Policies vs Individual Policies
Many attorneys carry disability coverage through their law firm’s group policy and assume that is sufficient. Cogdall is careful not to dismiss group disability insurance, but he draws a clear distinction between what a group policy is designed to do and what an individual disability insurance policy guarantees.
Group disability policies, he explains, are structured to return people to work as quickly as possible. The definitions of disability in those policies tend to be broader and less favorable to the claimant — in some cases requiring that a person be unable to perform any gainful occupation, not just their own. For a lawyer whose specific professional capacity has been compromised, that distinction can be the difference between a paid claim and a denied one.
An individual disability insurance policy, by contrast, is a guaranteed contract between the insurer and the policyholder alone. The terms don’t change at renewal. The carrier cannot reprice based on the claims experience of a larger group. And the definition of disability — particularly under own occupation coverage — is fixed at the time the policy is issued.
The risks most attorneys don’t anticipate
Cogdall is direct about where disability claims in the legal profession actually come from. Most people picture an accident — a car crash, a sports injury, something sudden and visible. The reality, he says, is that the majority of long-term disability claims stem from illness: cancer, neurological conditions, autoimmune disease, cardiovascular events. The kinds of diagnoses that arrive without obvious warning and can permanently alter a person’s professional capacity.
For lawyers, whose income depends on cognitive sharpness, communication, and the ability to perform under pressure, the implications of many common diagnoses are more severe than they might be in other professions. A condition that would allow someone in another field to continue working in a modified capacity may effectively end a litigation career.
There is also, Cogdall notes, the question of when to act. Disability insurance policies for attorneys and other professionals are underwritten at the time of application — not at the time of a claim. The health history a person brings to an application is the one that determines their coverage terms. As lawyers move through their careers and approach the years when serious diagnoses become more common, that window for obtaining favorable coverage quietly closes.
What the fine print obscures
For attorneys evaluating income protection for attorneys, Cogdall’s central argument is that the policy definition — specifically the own occupation language — matters more than almost any other feature. Premium cost, benefit period, and waiting period are all meaningful variables, but they are secondary to understanding precisely what conditions will trigger a paid claim.
The gap between what a disability insurance policy appears to promise and what it delivers under real-world conditions is, in Cogdall’s experience, where most professionals are surprised. And in the legal profession, surprises in the fine print tend to arrive at the worst possible moment.
The broader conversation is worth hearing
The attorney’s story is one thread in a longer discussion about how disability insurance carriers evaluate occupational risk, why individual and group policies behave so differently when a claim is actually filed, and what legal professionals and other high-income earners consistently misunderstand about their coverage.
The full podcast covers considerably more ground — including how carriers think about professional risk, what happens when an initial underwriting offer comes back unfavorable, and why the market for individual disability coverage has contracted as sharply as it has over the past three decades. For any professional whose income depends on a specific, hard-won set of skills, it is a useful hour.