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| After
the Storm:
He had weathered
the initial weeks with no income as he tended to family needs. Then, having saved his office computer and located
temporary space, he had made a run at reconstructing his practice
— primarily environmental and land use law — from scratch. After several weeks, he realized the local economic
foundation of his practice had sustained too much damage. He wasn’t going to make it. “I swallowed hard,
made a business decision, and filed Chapter 7,” says Morse. For this third-generation Gulfport lawyer, the
pain of the loss runs deep: “You just can’t fathom it until it happens
to you.” Transitioning out
of private practice, Morse now encounters new legal challenges after
picking up contract work for an affordable housing group, and he contemplates
how his life and work will develop in the years ahead. Morse’s story typifies
the continuing experience of many who labor in the legal systems of
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
While most of us in the Upper Midwest might be ready to mentally
file Hurricane Katrina under “yesterday’s news,” it remains very much
in the present for those in the Gulf Coast region.
Legal professionals
there must cope with reconfigured landscapes in their personal lives,
legal practices, legal issues they confront, and court operations. As they prepare for an uncertain future, one
thing they do know for certain is that another hurricane season will
soon be upon them. The
Personal Impact Talks with members
of the Gulf Coast legal profession and reports from a Minnesota State
Bar Association delegation that recently visited the region reveal
that legal professionals there are serving often-desperate clients
while simultaneously dealing with tremendous upheaval in their personal
lives. “People lived with
total disruption for the better part of four months,” says Frank Neuner,
Louisiana State Bar Association president.
Any semblance of normalcy was just beginning to reappear in
February. In Louisiana — especially
in the greater New Orleans area — at least 50 percent of the state’s
practicing lawyers lost homes, offices, or both.
In coastal Mississippi, the storm damaged or destroyed the
homes or offices (or both) of about 900 lawyers — more than 10 percent
of the legal profession in that state. Across the Gulf Coast,
legal professionals commonly have shared the struggles facing many
of the people they serve: reconstructing home, workplace and livelihood;
suffering displacement, stress, and the weariness of everyday life
among ruins. They have faced acute
shortages of housing — and rapid inflation in the cost of it — and
price-gougers and others who would exploit such a disaster. They have shared frustration with government
agencies, insurance companies, and unresolved contingencies that prevent
plans for rebuilding. The emotional
toll can be a burden. Jimmy Fry directs
disaster legal response for Legal Services of Alabama, one of the
organizations to receive a grant from the Minnesota State Bar.
His home, heavily damaged, sits on a barrier island in Gulf
Shores. Armed guards still patrol to fend off looters,
and state trucks carrying off debris rumble down the roads, he says. “It’s like a huge
landfill there,” says Fry, “with neighbors’ furniture and ocean debris
piled all around.” Like his Gulf Coast neighbors, he has faced roofers
and tree removal crews — “a lot of them charlatans” — who have rushed
in to do repair work, which they halfway complete before stopping
to demand more money. Joy Phillips, Mississippi
State Bar Association president, lives and works in Gulfport. She echoes the feelings of her coastal Mississippi
neighbors and legal colleagues as they press ahead with their business
in the area they love, weary with the devastation that remains a half-year
after Katrina made landfall.
In New Orleans, calamity
swept up legal professionals and their families along with everyone
else. “There was so much to do to recover yourself
that it essentially was a full-time job for months,” says Mark Moreau,
codirector of Southeast Louisiana Legal Services. To that, one had to add one’s legal work. Moreau and his wife
lost their home when levees broke.
Getting back on their feet, they had to deal with the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), other agencies and insurance companies,
find a new place to live amid an acute housing shortage and skyrocketing
costs, and generally reconstruct their lives.
His wife, a child
psychologist, lost 90 percent of her business because of client displacement.
Grateful that he retained his job, they found a silver lining
in the loss of hers: at least she had time to deal with FEMA and the
others. “For most lawyers,
there has been no relief from stress — first dealing with clients’,
then their own from personal dilemmas,” Moreau says. Ellen Artopoeus,
of New Orleans’ Pro Bono Project (another MSBA grant recipient), sees
lawyers and staff so hard-pressed they sometimes just can’t find time
to do their legal work. “You’ve got to meet an insurance adjuster
about the damage to your house, for instance, or handle other personal
business that takes a lot of time,” she says. Grocery stores, pharmacies,
restaurants and other commercial establishments have operated with
greatly restricted hours since the storms because of labor shortages,
supply shortages, security concerns, and other factors.
People have had to interrupt work days to purchase food and
other necessities. Marta Schnabel, president-elect
of the Louisiana Bar Association, has a New Orleans insurance defense
practice with her husband. Since
Katrina, they and their two children have lived in three locations. Uncertainty about access to skilled labor and
the cost of materials stalled repairs to make their home habitable
for nearly five months. When her daughter
fell ill with pneumonia in January, Schnabel spent more than an hour
waiting in line at a pharmacy during her normal working hours, with
no certainty that the needed antibiotic would be available when she
reached the front of the line. The store had the item that day, but pharmacies
suffer common shortages of medication. The Mississippi Bar
Association has conducted training for its members on peer-to-peer
counseling to help both fellow attorneys and clients recognize and
deal with depression, chemical dependency, anxiety and other fallout
from the lingering disaster. Challenges
to Practices Since Katrina, many
Gulf Coast lawyers have grappled with reconstructing lost client files,
sometimes to no avail. Many
have had to operate from temporary quarters — sometimes at home, often
crowded into space offered by fellow lawyers whose offices remained
intact. At least one Mississippi
lawyer conducted his practice from the front seat of his truck for
a time. Donations of furniture
and funds from the MSBA and others helped many start to reestablish
offices and practices.
Repopulating a law
office sometimes has been difficult, due to staffers’ relocation and
tight job markets. In Mississippi,
some legal support staffers have found salvage and construction work
more lucrative than returning to firms. In hard-hit areas
like New Orleans, housing shortages and costs have prevented legal
secretaries and other support staff from returning to their law firm
employers. Mainly, only support staffers who lived in dry
neighborhoods have come back — if substantial hiring bonuses offered
by restaurants and other service businesses have not lured them away.
Consequently, it
is very common that lawyers must carry out support tasks themselves
— or take extraordinary measures to retain staffers. One lawyer, after
acquiring a FEMA trailer, let his secretary live in it beside his
ruined New Orleans home while he and his newlywed wife moved in with
his mother elsewhere in the metropolitan area.
Otherwise, the secretary would have had to abandon her job
and join her husband. who had been displaced to Houston, Texas. A decimated Postal
Service workforce in New Orleans has provided such slow, uneven service
that Mark Moreau and other area lawyers commonly have had to deliver
documents and notices themselves to meet deadlines.
Courier services are not functioning, and traffic congestion
aggravates the time lawyers must devote to such tasks.
Lawyers in all stricken
areas have had to assess whether they can maintain an economically
viable law practice there, observers note. While most coastal
Mississippi lawyers apparently have remained for love of the area,
most general practitioners were out of work for months following Katrina. Reilly Morse observed that many essentially
dropped their legal practice for long periods and devoted themselves
to rescue work with churches and nonprofits. With clients’ economic
futures also uncertain, some lawyers may be forced either to relocate
or to change careers if savings will not sustain them until the local
economy rebounds. Some already
have left law behind to pursue construction business, now abundant,
or other livelihoods. By nearly all accounts,
most displaced New Orleans lawyers want to return.
However, New Orleans’ uncertain future has stymied lawyers’
decision making and planning. “Until FEMA produces
maps of where rebuilding could occur — expected no sooner than late
March — everything will remain on hold,” explains Helena Henderson,
executive director of the New Orleans Bar Association.
She predicts that when residents return, they will want New
Orleans lawyers to handle their local problems — so law practices
should thrive then. New
Legal Issues Across the Gulf Coast,
lawyers — especially those serving low-income clients — are seeing
common but new legal issues. Joe
Carr, a lawyer with Legal Services of Alabama, has been practicing
30 years. Still, he says, “We’re seeing clients now with
problems I never even thought of.” Many involve child
custody and storm-scattered exspouses. Many children were visiting
noncustodial parents when the hurricane hit over a weekend.
Some of these parents evacuated with their children and have
not returned, seizing “custody by Katrina,” as Sarah Campbell, a managing
attorney with Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, puts it. Meanwhile, jurisdictional
issues arise when both parents were displaced to separate states. Some custodial parents,
evacuated with their children to distant states, now have no home
or job to return to. Their
former spouses sue them for moving the children out of state without
court approval. Or exspouses seek change of custody on grounds
that the storm made the custodial parents homeless and jobless — and
therefore unsuitable for custody.
Issues involving
FEMA aid for home repair have been multiplying.
Sometimes, lienholders and property owners tussle over the
funds. Many cases involve navigation of the process
and appeals of denials. Especially
in Louisiana, they also involve property title issues. Possession of family
homes there commonly has passed informally, without recording a title
change, to succeeding generations.
FEMA will provide home repair assistance only to the title
holder. The recorded title holder often is long-dead,
so current residents must establish proper title. “Succession” case loads for low-income legal
services have exploded. Numerous cases involve
claims of contractor fraud, illegal sales of water-damaged vehicles,
and lender foreclosures. Perhaps most common
are housing issues. Tenants’
economic distress leads to evictions.
Evictions are also increasingly common when property owners
can get more from new tenants — often construction workers flowing
into stricken areas — or by replacing rental units with condominiums
on desirable parcels. A dramatic example
involves litigation by Legal Services of Alabama on behalf of 280
residents evicted from an apartment complex on Mobile Bay.
According to LSA’s Joe Carr, the hurricane damaged at most
15 percent of the units in the complex.
However, the owner, an out-of-state corporation, in late September
declared the complex a total loss and ordered all residents to vacate
within ten days. No alternative housing was available in the
area. Across the region,
landlords have been known to resort to self-help evictions that sometimes
sidestep proper legal procedures and tenant rights. Increased
Burdens Lawyers serving low-income
populations in the region report huge increases in their case loads
since Katrina. In Alabama,
waves of evacuees from Louisiana and Mississippi have nearly doubled
Legal Services of Alabama’s case load.
The Mississippi Center for Legal Services sees ever-increasing
numbers of clients as people begin to look beyond their immediate
needs for survival, reports director Sam Buchanan. Across the region,
a lot of people who traditionally would not have needed legal aid
society services before Katrina now have joined the crowd.
They include business owners facing bankruptcy and former middle
class workers whose workplaces or livelihoods have been lost. The region’s low-income
legal service agencies received sparse funds even before the storm-spurred
case load increases. Ann Brown,
supervising attorney with Legal Services of Alabama, emphasizes that
financial assistance from the MSBA enabled LSA to hire two part-time
attorneys to handle disaster cases, thereby freeing staff attorneys
to return to more normal case loads.
Carr further notes that MSBA assistance has enabled his agency
to advocate more vigorously and adequately for its clients, now more
numerous and desperate. Impact
on Court Systems Most Gulf Coast court
systems apparently had adapted and recovered enough to function relatively
well again by February. Even
so, after months of disruption in hard-hit Louisiana, “No one has
a grip yet on the precise situation,” according to Louisiana Supreme
Court Justice Catherine Kimball. At least 20 of Louisiana’s
local and state court systems endured varying damage to facilities
and records and displacement of court personnel.
The hurricane was capricious here as elsewhere, destroying
some facilities and their records, tremendously damaging others, but
inflicting only slight damage to others. In the months since
Katrina, courts have shifted to temporary facilities where needed,
borrowed space in undamaged federal or state courts or in other legal
organizations, and circulated available judges among facilities as
they became operational. Dislocation of judges and court personnel contributed
to disruptions: of the 18 state district court judges serving New
Orleans, 13 lost their homes to the storm. Two Mississippi county
courts with heavily damaged or destroyed courthouses now operate temporarily
in trailers.
Lawyers in the region
variously mention court holidays, legislative action, and executive
orders as remedies that have been taken to address limitations periods
for civil cases until courts and lawyers could function again.
As 2006 got under way, Gulf Coast lawyers report, civil courts
in New Orleans were just beginning to hear cases again, although uncertainty
about juror availability was thwarting scheduling of jury trials.
The situation was similar in stricken areas of Mississippi. Flooding in the records
room of New Orleans’ criminal district court caused major problems,
damaging or destroying records and evidence, Justice Kimball reports. As rescuers focused on the living, victims’
bodies remained floating in the flooded coroner’s office in the courthouse
basement. The floodwaters left
major mold contamination, and various agencies disagree on when the
courthouse can be reoccupied, according to Justice Kimball. Floodwaters damaged
documents, many involving land records, which necessitated shipping
them out of state for a costly freeze-drying restoration process. Costs of this document restoration in one small
Louisiana parish were such that the court presented a statement to
FEMA in February seeking reimbursement for $490,000. Meanwhile, observers
forecast that economic devastation in affected areas will continue
to produce major financial problems for Gulf Coast court systems in
years to come. In Mississippi, says Joy Phillips, heavy damage
to local tax bases will force big budget cuts and staff reductions
for state courts. In Louisiana,
Justice Kimball explains, most state courts are financed by self-generated
revenues like filing fees. Hurricane-caused
disruptions are stifling those revenues and will force budget cuts
and layoffs, she predicts. Meanwhile, hurricane-related
litigation has barely begun to trickle into Gulf Coast state court
systems, and many of those interviewed predict an eventual deluge
of legal action. “I expect to be dealing with Katrina (and Rita)
problems for the rest of my career,” Justice Kimball says. Looking
Ahead Even as they strive
to piece together their personal lives, legal systems, and law practices
in early 2006, Gulf Coast legal professionals remain acutely aware
that another hurricane season looms just a few months ahead — and
another will arrive every year afterward.
Disaster preparation plans are part of reconstruction efforts. Jimmy Fry is helping
write a statewide disaster response plan for Alabama.
This will include directions for preparing backup record systems
and contingencies for communication during disruption of conventional
channels. He strongly encourages
such planning in every region of the country.
“Catastrophe can come in many forms, with many faces,” he says,
and one can readily imagine his sentiments echoed by a Minnesota tornado
victim, or one of the Faegre & Benson attorneys who still remembers
the Northwest Bank Building fire in the 1980s. The experience of
protecting and relocating a bank corporate legal department is familiar
to Joy Phillips, who advocates disaster planning for organizations
regardless of location. “Make sure your department or organization has
its own disaster plan,” she says,
“for backing up records, knowing the location of all employees,
planning where to go and how to contact each other afterward, and
who is responsible for securing your office.” Louisiana’s state
courts are well into preparing disaster plans to minimize future disruptions,
according to Justice Kimball. The
state also is considering legislation that would change court system
structure to enable smoother response to disaster disruptions in future.
Gulf Coast lawyers
express deep appreciation for assistance they have received from the
MSBA and others from outside the region.
More than six months
after the catastrophe, Gulf Coast lawyers generally remain hopeful
and determined to develop new lives and practices there.
In Mississippi, Joy
Phillips says, “There is tremendous resolve here.
People have strong pride and a sense of being part of a communal
effort, knowing we mainly have to help ourselves.”
In a similar vein, Louisiana’s Sarah Campbell expresses sentiment
commonly heard: “After the hurricane, I have worked harder than I
ever have in my life — and it has been the most rewarding experience
of my life.” Minnesota lawyers who have contributed time
and resources to support such as these can justifiably take pride
in their effort. MIKE VITT
is a lawyer, writer, and principal of Vitt Communications, providing
writing, editing, and communications consulting services from his
offices in Minneapolis. He is a past cochair of MSBA’s Practice Management
and Marketing Section.
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S
“This
is not going to be over for a long time,” she says.
Locating
storm-displaced clients often has been time-consuming and difficult.
Very
common, too, are disputes over insurance coverage for losses due to
wind-blown water or storm surges, with home insurers contending that
this was flood damage not covered by their policies.
Since
Katrina, Louisiana courts have given priority to criminal cases and
matters subject to time constraints, scrambling to maintain constitutional
and statutory standards despite personnel dislocations, staff shortages,
limited hours of operation, and other hurdles.