Zack Evans, Attorney
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Accreditation Number: 41455
Southern Illinois University, J.D., 2015
University of Southern Indiana, B.A. Political Science, 2010
When you ask Zack why he’s a veterans lawyer, he’ll tell you about his clients.
“You just can’t believe what some of them have been through and that the VA is so willing to look the other way for so long,” he said. “I feel this sense of indignation whenever I get into their files, and I see some of these denials for people that are very clearly impacted by their service.”
Favorite bands
Radiohead, The Mars Volta, Pink Floyd
Favorite activities
Music production, science news, spending time with family, history
Favorite quote
“A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky, rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.” (Buddha)
Zack went to law school so he could help people. That’s what working at Woods and Woods allows him to do.
“I feel like the work that we do here really matters to people that need help and have been really overlooked by a system that promised to take care of them,” he said.
Zack is especially frustrated when he reads a compensation and pension (C&P) exam report and sees that the examiner declared the veteran “fine” after a 20-minute appointment.
“If they’re not asking the right questions, if they’re not using the right discussion drivers, if they don’t ask somebody about their deployment, I don’t know how they could elicit anything of value,” he said. “We see exams like that all the time.”
But it’s the psychiatric reports that get to him the most.
“You see who they were when they were a kid, who they were when they wore the uniform, and when that identity was taken from them after what happened to them in service,” he said. “I don’t know what is going to convince people to stop fighting wars, but I think some of that is in veterans’ C-files.”
