Daniel G. Martin
How Judge Martin decides
Patterns drawn from this judge's own signed orders. Every observation links to the order it came from.
What persuades
On consent Social Security review, every remand in this slice turns on the same recurring defect: the ALJ failed to build a 'logical bridge' from the evidence to the RFC/credibility findings, or mishandled a medical/psychological opinion. A claimant before him should frame the challenge precisely as a missing logical bridge tied to specific evidence the ALJ failed to reconcile. (All 4 SSA dispositions captured here were remands — see the caveat; this is not a measured remand rate.)
“Plaintiff Anthony Tincher's Motion for Summary Judgment [17] is granted. The Commissioner's Motion for Summary Judgment [21] is denied.”
Procedural preferences
On referred discovery he resolves privilege/ownership questions on the substantive merits rather than reflexively: he compelled production over attorney-client and work-product objections after finding the records were statutorily owned by the FDIC-Receiver or covered by the common-interest doctrine. Privilege assertions need to survive a real ownership/common-interest analysis.
“Plaintiff's Motion to Compel [97] is granted.”
On jurisdictional discovery he calibrates protective orders narrowly to need: he denied one protective-order motion as moot, granted a second to stop expansion of jurisdictional discovery, and gave a plaintiff's document-discovery request only in part — opening discovery only where there was a concrete unanswered factual question (a defendant's role in shipping the accused product to the U.S.). Tie any jurisdictional-discovery request to a specific unresolved jurisdictional fact.
“Plaintiff's Request is granted in part and denied in part.”
Motion outcomes
Counted from classified signed orders only. Percentages are shown only where the sample is large enough to be meaningful; smaller samples are reported as raw counts.
| Social security review N = 4 |
Granted: 4 | counts only |
| Motions to compel N = 2 |
Granted: 1Granted in part: 1 | counts only |
| Motion for protective order N = 2 |
Granted: 1Moot / procedural: 1 | counts only |
A "1 of 1" is one ruling, not a tendency. Treat small samples as illustrative, not predictive.
Signed rulings
A grounded sample of orders signed by this judge, with the verbatim dispositive language.
“the first Motion for Protective Order is denied as moot”
“the second Motion for Protective Order is granted”
“Plaintiff's Request is granted in part and denied in part.”
“the ALJ's decision is reversed, and this case is remanded to the Social Security Administration”
“Plaintiff's Motion to Compel [97] is granted.”
“Plaintiff Stacey Lynn Stone's Motion for Summary Judgment [14] is granted.”
“Plaintiff Anthony Tincher's Motion for Summary Judgment [17] is granted. The Commissioner's Motion for Summary Judgment [21] is denied.”
“Plaintiff Morgan Heuschmidt's Motion for Summary Judgment [13] is granted.”
Caseload & timing
From public federal docket records for this judge.
Martin was a magistrate judge from 2012 until his death in 2018. His civil reasoning work — Social Security consent dispositions and referred civil discovery (motions to compel, protective orders) — is reflected in the GovInfo reasoning layer; a clean assigned-case duration list was not enumerated this pass.