Kentucky lawyer who helped people hurt in massive Eric Conn disability scam honored

An Eastern Kentucky attorney who recruited scores of lawyers to try to help people keep benefits after the largest disability scam in U.S. history has received a national award.

Ned Pillersdorf, whose office is in Prestonsburg, is one of four lawyers and one law firm in the county receiving the Pro Bono Publico Award this year, according the the American Bar Association.

The award honors “outstanding commitment to volunteer legal services for low-income and disadvantaged persons,” according to the ABA release.

Pillersdorf said he is the first attorney from Kentucky to receive the award.

Pro bono, a Latin term, translates to “for the public good.”

Pillersdorf led an effort to recruit lawyers to represent people who faced losing Social Security disability benefits as a result of long-running, massive fraud perpetrated by Eric C. Conn.

Conn, of Pikeville, called himself “Mr. Social Security” and was once one of the most prolific disability lawyers in the country, but admitted in 2017 he used fake evidence in claims and paid a Social Security judge more than $600,000 in bribes to approve claims.

Conn’s fraud would have cost the government more than $500 million, officials said at the time, though he got caught before all that was paid out.

Conn ultimately pleaded guilty to stealing from the Social Security Administration (SSA) and other charges, and is serving a 27-year sentence.

Many of Conn’s former clients lost benefits as SSA ground through a process of re-determining their eligibility as a result of Conn’s fraud, even though their attorneys have argued the clients had no knowledge of Conn’s wrongdoing, didn’t take part in it, and never met him in many cases.

That’s where Pillersdorf and others stepped in to find lawyers who would represent former Conn clients free of charge.

Pillersdorf said that effort involved 140 volunteers who handled hearings and court cases around the country, preserving benefits for many former Conn clients.

Volunteers represented former Conn clients in 2,000 hearings and more than 250 individual federal court cases, according to the American Bar Association release.

“This is truly the largest volunteer effort in the history of the nation,” Pillersdorf said.

Pillersdorf said he was honored to receive the bar association award, but noted some of Conn’s former clients still face Social Security hearings on their eligibility, eight years after the “nightmare” of concern over losing their livelihood began.

“I’d be happy to give it back if they’d stop these damn hearings,” he said of the award.

Pillersdorf, 68, has been lawyer for 42 years.

Nearly all of that time has been in Eastern Kentucky, where he moved to work as a public defender and met his wife, Janet Stumbo, who later served on the Kentucky Court of Appeals and Supreme Court.

The ABA Pro Publico Awards began in 1984.

Several other people were convicted in the fraud carried out by Conn: David Daugherty, the Social Security judge Conn bribed for favorable decisions; Bradley Adkins, a Pikeville psychologist convicted of signing falsified evaluation forms for Conn; and Charlie Paul Andrus, a judge at the Huntington, W.Va. Social Security office with Daugherty who admitted trying to help Conn discredit an agency whistleblower.