Jandreau v. Nicholson

492 F.3d 1372 (Fed. Cir. 2007), decided July 3, 2007. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, No. 2007-7029, Circuit Judge Dyk. Precedential. Reversed and remanded.

Buchanan is about credibility — whether your story is believed. Jandreau is about competence — whether you are qualified to say the thing at all. The two get confused constantly, including by the Board, and they are different questions decided at different steps.

What it holds

The Veterans Court had said that "competent medical evidence is required" whenever "the determinative issue involves either medical etiology or a medical diagnosis." The Federal Circuit held that formulation "too broad."

Lay evidence can be competent and sufficient to establish a diagnosis in three situations:

1. a layperson is competent to identify the medical condition — the court's footnote gives the line: sometimes they are, as with a broken leg, and sometimes not, as with a form of cancer;
2. the layperson is reporting a contemporaneous medical diagnosis — repeating what a doctor said at the time; or
3. lay testimony describing symptoms at the time supports a later diagnosis by a medical professional.

The Veterans Court had allowed only the third. The Federal Circuit said the first two count as well.

And one more holding that does a lot of work in practice: whether lay evidence is competent and sufficient in a particular case is a question of fact for the Board, not a legal question for the Veterans Court. That is why so many appeals on this point end in a remand rather than a reversal.

What happened in the record

Mr. Jandreau said he dislocated his shoulder during basic training at Fort Dix and was treated on base. His service medical records had been destroyed in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center. He submitted a statement from a fellow serviceman — "I remember Alva being in great pain after dislocating his shoulder while in training" — and later medical reports, one assessing his condition as "right shoulder pain, most likely sequelae of his dislocation of the shoulder."

The Board rejected all of it, holding that he and his buddy were "not competent to present evidence to establish the etiology of a current disability," and that the doctor's assessment merely recorded what Mr. Jandreau had told him. The Veterans Court affirmed, saying that "whether he experienced a dislocation of his shoulder requires a medical diagnosis." That is the holding the Federal Circuit reversed.

The argument that did not work

Mr. Jandreau also argued that because the government destroyed his records while they were in its custody, his burden of proof should be relaxed. The court rejected that, and it is worth knowing so nobody builds a claim on it. The ordinary rule for an adverse inference requires a duty to preserve, a culpable state of mind, and relevance — and he conceded there was no evidence of government negligence in the fire. VA has instead eased the evidentiary path for fire-loss cases by accepting substitute documents, including statements from fellow service members, rather than by presuming service connection.

So the record loss does not lower the bar. It makes lay evidence the route, which is exactly why the competence rule matters.

What it does not hold

It does not say a layperson can diagnose anything. The first situation is bounded by whether the condition is one a layperson can identify, and that is a fact question each time. The court expressly declined to decide whether Mr. Jandreau's own evidence was competent and sufficient — "a matter beyond our jurisdiction" — and sent it back to the Board.

A real-world failure worth noting: a Board can find you competent to describe symptoms and then write as though your statements are not competent evidence at all. Those two findings contradict each other, and situation (3) is the one most often skipped.

Finding the opinion

The Federal Circuit's official PDF: 07-7029.pdf. Published at 492 F.3d 1372.

Reviewed October 6, 2026