Citizen Soldier Law

When a reservist gets a medical evaluation board notice and has a fixed window to respond, with a career, a pension, and a disability rating all riding on the paperwork, the firm handling that case needs to already know the process cold. Citizen Soldier Law was built for exactly that situation. The firm runs MEB, PEB, and IDES cases, files for the Physical Disability Board of Review when a past rating was lowballed, and handles discharge upgrades for service members who left under conditions they want corrected. These are not areas a general civil practice tends to know in depth, and Citizen Soldier Law has put them at the center of what it does.

Military service on the firm's roster

The team behind that focus is worth examining. Citizen Soldier Law lists retired JAG lawyers, a former Assistant Prosecutor, and a retired Army National Guard HR NCO on its roster, plus a board-certified physician specializing in physical medicine and rehabilitation. That last hire is structurally significant. Disability board cases turn on medical evidence as much as on legal argument, and having a physiatrist inside the practice who reads the same records the board reads is a genuine advantage over firms that bring in outside experts case by case. The firm also states its people carry more than 100 years of combined military service, including veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom, so the administrative language of orders, ranks, and boards is not something the team is learning on a client's dime.

Practice areas across military careers

The practice areas at Citizen Soldier Law map onto the actual lifecycle of a military career and the things that tend to go wrong inside it. Courts-martial defense and military administrative actions sit alongside discharge upgrades and board reviews. Security clearance matters get dedicated attention, which is directly relevant to anyone whose livelihood depends on keeping access. Weapons possession advocacy is listed too, a niche that appears more often than people outside law enforcement and the military might expect. The pattern is consistent: Citizen Soldier Law has built its identity around the problems that follow people who serve, not around practice areas that happened to be profitable.

Civilian services for military families

Citizen Soldier Law does not stop at the uniformed community. The client list extends to law enforcement officers, firefighters, medical professionals, and civilians, which shows the firm has built a broader practice around its military core. On the civilian side it handles criminal defense and DWI, personal injury, family law and divorce, employment and workers' compensation, and estate planning and real estate. That spread is wide, and a skeptic could read it two ways: either as a full-service firm that can carry a service member's family through more than one legal need, or as a practice stretched across too much ground to go deep anywhere.

The civilian areas listed are the ones a military family actually runs into: a divorce during a deployment, an injury claim, a will, a house closing. Pairing those services with disability and discharge work means a National Guard member dealing with a board case and a custody dispute at the same time does not have to assemble two separate firms. The throughline at Citizen Soldier Law is people who serve or have served, and the practical problems that follow them home.

Offices in New Jersey and Alabama

The two-office structure reinforces that reach. Citizen Soldier Law operates out of Hackettstown, New Jersey, with a second location in Huntsville, Alabama. Huntsville sits next to Redstone Arsenal and a dense concentration of active military and defense personnel, so a Southern outpost there reads as a deliberate move toward where clients actually are.

Contact details are easy to surface on the Citizen Soldier Law site. A phone number, fax line, email address, and both physical addresses appear in plain view, so a prospective client can reach the New Jersey office or the Alabama one without hunting through menus or filling out a form first. For a practice that deals in time-sensitive military deadlines, that directness is a practical feature.

Rating and client feedback

Citizen Soldier Law holds a 4.8-star rating across 67 reviews on Birdeye, a healthy volume for a regional firm and a strong average by any measure. Its Facebook presence shows a 92 percent recommendation rate, though only across a handful of reviews. There is also a Yelp listing tied to Madison, New Jersey, with no visible rating in what surfaced publicly. The Birdeye figure stands on its own here because of the count behind it. Sixty-seven people taking time to rate a law firm is a meaningful sample, and a 4.8 across that many does not happen by chance.

It is worth being clear-eyed about what those reviews can and cannot tell you. They speak to client experience, responsiveness, and perceived outcomes. They do not tell you how a courts-martial defense will land or whether a board will overturn a disability rating, because that depends on facts no review can capture. What the reputation does confirm is that Citizen Soldier Law is active and leaving satisfied clients behind, which is the baseline any serious legal practice has to clear before the specialized credentials start to matter.

Why specialize in military disability cases?

The specialization is where Citizen Soldier Law separates itself from a generalist down the street. Plenty of firms will take a veteran's case. Far fewer have a physiatrist on staff, retired JAG attorneys who argued these cases from inside the system, and a named practice built around the alphabet soup of MEB, PEB, IDES, and PDBR. A discharge upgrade or a disability board review is procedural, deadline-bound, and unforgiving of lawyers who are learning the rules in real time. That specific territory is where Citizen Soldier Law has concentrated its investment.

One reasonable question for any broad-practice firm: a prospective client should confirm that the attorney handling their matter has real depth in that exact area, since the same shingle covers everything from a security clearance appeal to a real estate closing. The credentials listed at Citizen Soldier Law are concentrated on the military and disability side, which is also where the firm most clearly wants to be known. On the strength of what is published, Citizen Soldier Law makes a credible case for anyone facing a military legal matter, with the physician-on-staff and JAG pedigree as the details that lift it past a generically veteran-friendly firm into something more focused.