Attorney Ida Comerford Was So Good, She Put Her Name on the Door

Ida Comerford was ten years old when she drafted her first legal document, a will leaving her soccer ball to her cousin. “Yeah, there was no executor,” she recalls now. “It was a really poor, poor example of a legal document, actually.” It would be another two decades before she had a law degree, but the instinct, she says, was already there.

Today, Ida is a named partner at Hiller Comerford Injury & Disability Law, a Buffalo firm handling Social Security disability, veterans disability, and personal injury cases for clients across the country. Her name went on the door in 2024, when the practice her boss built over more than two decades, the Law Offices of Kenneth Hiller, PLLC, became Hiller Comerford. She runs the firm’s disability practice alongside named partner Tim Hiller, who oversees personal injury and veterans cases.

Ida told her story this year on the debut episode of Trial by Fire, a podcast hosted by Julia Hensel that profiles women who have built or grown their own law firms. Over the course of the conversation, Ida talked about the jobs that led her to Hiller Comerford, the phone call that made her a partner, and the courtroom habits she still swears by.

A Craigslist Ad and a Very Bad Day

Ida grew up the daughter of a construction worker and a beautician, neither of whom finished high school. Nobody in her family practiced law, but she gravitated early toward history, politics, and rules. Out of college, she found her way into an estate planning firm and discovered she loved the work, not the paperwork exactly, but the people behind it.

 “It was so human-to-human, and I’ve always been really attracted to that.”

She still remembers a widow who arrived at the office with a shutoff notice from the electric company, having never paid a bill in her life because her husband had always handled it. It’s the kind of moment, Ida says, that hooked her on the work for good.

When her family relocated to California, she hadn’t logged enough years in practice to waive into the state bar, so she took a job as a deputy public administrator for San Diego County, securing the estates of people who died with no known next of kin.

“It was really kind of creepy because it was death scene investigation,” she says. “It ended up being a really, really cool job. … It was never the same day twice.”

The family moved back to New York a few years later, and Ida left the workforce to raise her three children. The break lasted until one especially rough afternoon at home.

“I was having one really bad day with my kids. They wouldn’t put their shoes on, the house was a wreck, and I was just sitting on the steps crying. And I saw this ad for an attorney doing Social Security law.”

She applied on Craigslist, heard nothing for six months, and eventually landed an interview with Ken Hiller, something of a local celebrity thanks to his billboards.

“He was on a lot of commercials and a lot of billboards at that time, so I basically just asked him all about what it was like to be famous in Buffalo.”

She got the job. Two days after putting her oldest child on the kindergarten bus, Ida started as a hearing attorney.

Her Journey to Named Partner

What followed was less a single turning point than a slow accumulation of trust. Ida took on hiring, training, and leadership responsibilities long before she had a title for them, then earned one: operations manager, a label she still finds a little ill-fitting for what the job became. When the pandemic hit, she moved the firm’s training online almost overnight and kept new attorneys oriented from their kitchen tables.

Eventually, Ken Hiller called her directly to talk about retirement.

Hiller’s son, Tim, had built out the firm’s veterans disability and personal injury departments but wanted a partner who could run the operation day-to-day. Ida bought in, and in 2024 the Law Offices of Kenneth Hiller became Hiller Comerford Injury & Disability Law.

Since then, Ida has represented hundreds of clients in disability hearings and written extensively to appeal denials in federal court. She has helped grow the firm’s disability practice to more than 20 attorneys and over 90 total employees. She has taken a hands-on role training and building out its administrative and appellate departments.

“You Have to Be the Hardest Worker in the Room”

Ida is candid about her advice for anyone new to a courtroom, especially women.

“You have to be the hardest worker in the room. You have to be the smartest person in the room. I made it my business to really be armed with the knowledge of the law on my side. For a while, it surprised them. They did not see me coming. They thought I was invisible.”

That approach shaped one case she still talks about: a client whose foot fracture developed into complex regional pain syndrome, a condition the judge overseeing his hearing didn’t fully grasp. Ida built her argument around four separate treating-source opinion letters and delivered a closing statement that changed the outcome.

“I think I really kind of snatched victory from the jaws of defeat on that one.”

Her client won his benefits. Years later, his son came to her with his own case, and she won that one too.

Outside her own caseload, Ida Comerford has been a speaker for the National Organization of Social Security Claimants’ Representatives (NOSSCR) and is finishing a three-year term as chair of the Erie County Bar Association’s Disability Committee.

Life Outside the Office

Ida was born in Buffalo, spent years in San Diego, and has since returned home with her husband and three kids, now grown and off at college. She and her husband both ride motorcycles.

“I consider us a mixed marriage, because I ride a Harley and he rides an Indian,” she jokes.

She’s candid, too, about what disability law looks like from the outside.

“They immediately go to this notion that everybody is lying and everybody is trying to scam the system. … It’s really defeating, because I work so hard with people who are really, really severely injured.”

It’s the gap between that perception and what she’s actually seen in hearing rooms across the country, more than two decades of it, that keeps Ida Comerford doing the work. It’s also, she’d likely tell you, the reason her name is now on the door.