The rules are public. Finding them shouldn’t cost you a claim.
Legatus puts the VA’s rating criteria, evidence requirements, and preparation tools in one place — for veterans building their own claims, and for the VSO offices carrying a hundred at once.
- Built by
- A U.S. Army veteran
28 years of service - Affiliation
- Independent — not the VA
- Cost to start
- $0 — no account required
Why this exists
Claims aren’t lost because veterans aren’t eligible. They’re lost in the paperwork.
The criteria are buried. The rating schedule is public, but it's written for adjudicators — not for the person living the condition.
The evidence gap is invisible. Nobody tells you what’s missing until the denial letter does, months later.
The people who help are outnumbered. A service officer carrying a hundred open cases can’t spend three hours on each one. The prep work has to start before the appointment.
Who built it
Legatus was built by a U.S. Army veteran — twenty-eight years in. After I retired, I would accompany both my father, a U.S. Air Force veteran, and my father-in-law, a U.S. Navy retiree, to their respective local veterans groups. Different rooms, same story: a claim denied or underrated — not because the man was ineligible, but because he never found the one paragraph the decision was going to turn on. Somebody’s back pay hinged on an exam worksheet nobody told him existed.
None of it is secret. The rating criteria, the evidence requirements, the deadlines, the appeal lanes — all public, all federal regulation, all written for adjudicators rather than for the person living the condition. But it’s scattered across a regulation, a form, an exam worksheet, and a decision letter that explains nothing. Finding it and making sense of it takes hours most veterans don’t have, and the service officers who do this for a living are carrying more files than any one desk should hold.
So I built the thing I wanted in those rooms. Every rating criterion in Legatus is grounded in 38 C.F.R. and cited back to it. It doesn’t guess, it doesn’t promise you a number, and it doesn’t take a cut of your back pay. It tells you what the VA looks for and whether you’ve got it yet.
You earned this. You shouldn’t need a lawyer to collect it.
Founder, Legatus · U.S. Army veteran · 28 years of service
Who it’s for
Veterans filing their own
A guided five-phase navigator: find the conditions you can support, close the evidence gaps, file, track, and read the decision in plain language.
- Condition & secondary discovery
- Evidence checklists per condition
- C&P exam prep and DBQ assistance
VSO offices carrying caseloads
A command center for the whole desk: multi-contention cases, evidence classification, deadlines, decision review strategy, and operational reports.
- Command Center dashboard
- Seven-tab case detail
- Consent-gated bridge to the veteran's own file
What we will never do
- Take a percentage of your back pay.
- Sell, rent, or train outside models on your records.
- Promise you a rating. No one can.
- Claim to be, or speak for, the VA.
- State a rating criterion without citing it to 38 CFR.
- Lock your own data away from you.
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Read this part too
- Legatus is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in any way.
- Everything here is educational — not legal advice, not medical advice, not an official VA determination.
- For case-specific guidance, consult an accredited VSO or a VA-accredited attorney.