How Collaboration Powers Legal Aid’s Hurricane Response

Episode Notes

Transcript

Peter Dennis:

Understanding the sort of complex areas and what the services that people are able to access in your area is extremely important and guiding people because people don’t know they’re in survival mode. They don’t know exactly what’s out there or what they need.

Announcer:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice, an An LSC Podcast, we’ll explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the general public. Talk Justice is sponsored by the Leaders Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Ron Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation and your host for this episode. Today we’re talking about the critical role legal aid providers play in helping people recover from natural disasters. Hurricanes Helene Milton and Debbie caused severe flooding and destruction in several southeastern states this year and last year, hurricane Adalia also did significant damage to some of the same communities. In the wake of these devastating hurricanes, legal aid organizations have mobilized to provide emergency assistance and recovery services. In 2019, LSCs Disaster Task Force released a report and you can take a look at that report on LSCs website@lsc.gov. The report outlines a framework for understanding how legal needs evolve over time, following a disaster one to six weeks out, one to six months out, and then six months to years following the disaster. Legal services organizations must anticipate this cycle of civil legal issues so that they can be prepared to meet their community’s needs in each phase of recovery.

You may not understand or have an appreciation for the fact that when your house is blown over by a hurricane or burned down by a wildfire, that actually legal aid can help you. And to explain more about these efforts, we’re joined by four experts. Lesley Albritton is Chief of Staff at Legal Aid of North Carolina. Peter Dennis is managing attorney at Florida Rural Legal Services. Mike Monahan is pro bono director at Georgia Legal Services Program, and Jason Susalla is managing attorney for the Disaster Relief team at Bay Area Legal Services. Thank you all for joining me today and for really your heroic work in carrying out your day jobs. I want to spend the bulk of our conversation talking about your recovery work, but I’d like to start out by having each of you describe the impact these storms over the last couple of years have had on your communities. Could you each give us an idea of what your service areas are dealing with? And we’ll start with Lesley in North Carolina and move our way south to Mike in Georgia and then Jason and Peter in Florida. So Lesley, let’s start with you.

Lesley Albritton :

Thank you. Well, North Carolina is definitely no stranger to hurricanes and tropical storms, but Helene in particular has been uniquely devastating, and that’s in part due to the fact that the western part of our state is in and of itself so unique. The mountains of North Carolina really experienced unprecedented rock slides, flooding, mudslides, flooding, rains, and wind. As a result of Helene. And as of the time of this podcast, there are currently 93 verified deaths from Helene in North Carolina and many people are still missing in our state. And I mentioned that because our staff has been out in the Red Cross shelters and FEMA’s Disaster Recovery centers since it was safe to be on the ground. And they’re speaking with members of their own communities who have lost loved ones and neighbors. And that’s particularly impactful and difficult on those people within our organization who are providing services on the ground.

This storm is particularly devastating for jobs in Western North Carolina. It’s worth pointing out that our mountains are largely a tourist economy and the storm hit right before leaf peeping season. So we’re particularly concerned about the loss of jobs in our state. As of the middle of October, there are about 23 disaster unemployment claims already made in the state as a result of Helene. And this hits in an area of our state that’s very cost burdened and very precarious in terms of the housing market as well. We’re really worried that because of the way that the storm changed the topography of the state, that not only are we going to lose housing, but we’re going to actually lose land on which housing could be rebuilt as a result of the storm. There are still about 100 bridges that need to be repaired out in the western part of our state, and about 600 roads remain closed, which is making travel for our staff very difficult to get to the clients we want to serve.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Mike, what are you seeing in Georgia?

Mike Monahan:

Well, let me just begin by saying there’s Atlanta and there’s the rest of Georgia. And with all due respect to my friends here in Atlanta, if you’ve only been to Atlanta, you have not seen the rest of Georgia, and it’s a very different place. Georgia is home to dozens and dozens of counties in legal deserts. We have very few lawyers. Now that said, the affected Hurricane Helene has affected 61 of our 159 counties. We serve 154 counties in 60 of those particular counties. And those counties contain small cities in very rural Georgia. It’s heavily agricultural and it also is connected across swamps and lots of rivers, and it’s a heavily, heavily forested part of our state. So the hurricane brought in lots of damage, lots of trees down, caused lots of problems with electricity and communications. It disrupted businesses because no internet, no commerce, people were unable to purchase food early on, and a great deal of stress was put on the communities early on because of that lack of communication.

In addition to that, the agricultural economy took sustained a massive hit in many, many of these counties. In fact, the state government is pumping in over a billion or two in state funds to prop up the agricultural economy and the small farmers and large farmers we have throughout the southeastern part of the state, we have very high poverty levels and many of those counties that were affected. And so what was already a difficult situation for many communities and whether they were culturally isolated communities to begin with or tourist communities, they’re all suffering right now economically due to the lack of electricity and damage to buildings. So our work has been pretty much dealing with local connections where we can find them and people traveling to those areas. Three of our field offices were affected, Savannah, Augusta, heavily, Savannah and Brunswick, and the service area of our Albany office, which is the South Georgia is part of that territory as well. And to some degree our Macon regional office. We also had staff who are out of work and unable to access any communication and staff who live in damaged homes or have other damaged, severely damaged property. It’s a major challenge. And my 27 years or plus of doing pro bono, this is the largest scale disaster we’ve seen that I’ve seen in Georgia, and it affects so many people in so many different ways, including our farm worker community as well. And we have a very large farm worker community.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Well, we’ll look forward to hearing from all of you about what you’re doing to help out, but let’s keep marching south to hear how things have been affected. Jason, can you tell us what’s going on in the Tampa Bay metropolitan area?

Jason Susalla:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I’ll explain a little bit about our Bay Areas geographic situation here. We have a very small geographically direct service area that would be five counties in the Tampa Bay region. However, population wise, this includes millions of people. We have a very densely packed area. Pinellas County in our direct service area is the most densely populated county in the state. We have a reputation here in this part of the state to always have narrow misses to always avoid storms, and we didn’t get so lucky this year. We basically have three consecutive disaster incidents that we are dealing with. Let’s see here, back to, I think it was early August, that was Hurricane Debbie and Hurricane Debbie made landfall in the big band area of Florida, not too far from where Adalia made landfall, but Debbie affected us significantly. It went by us quite close and caused significant flooding in some of our southern counties, all of our counties, with the exception of one received disaster declarations for Debbie.

That was a start to our little journey here because Helene then came into town at the end of September. We were still recovering from Debbie, and Helene was a significant, and I cannot stress that word, more significant flooding event. Pinellas County, for example, had not seen a storm surge of that level since 1921. We are very coastal, Tampa Bay, Pinellas County, Pasco County, Sarasota. These are all within our direct service area and all were significantly flooded due to Helene. Well, I guess that’s early October then that Milton visited us and that was a direct impact. You see, Helene did not hit us directly. Helene, again, skirted by off the coast, but it was a strong enough storm and we were on what they called the dirty side of the storm. So it pushed water up into Tampa Bay and all of our coastal communities just creating extreme devastation. Milton was a direct impact in Sarasota, again, in our service area, our direct service area, and Milton was less of a flooding event and more of a rain and wind event. But this has compounded in amplified damage from two preexisting incidents. So we are just seeing extreme devastation here. We have not had something like this happen in any recent memory, so this is going to be a very long haul recovery process here in our communities.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Peter, can you first tell us what part of Florida your service area consists of and how your service area has been affected by the storms?

Peter Dennis:

Absolutely, and we are a neighbor of Jason’s, actually. We are in mid Florida. Florida rural legal services covers 13 counties across Florida from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean. Now I in the managing attorney of the Fort Myers office, which covers Lee, Charlotte, Hendry, DeSoto, and Glades Counties. And that’s approximately 4,200 square miles that our attorneys are working in every day. And in addition for the purposes of disaster work, we also cover Highlands and hardy counties, which usually would be covered by one of our other offices. Our service areas is spread out between our coastal areas and our inland areas, and those are extremely different. Number one, we’re tired. We just had Ian two years ago and that was just a catastrophic storm for us. And then with these two storms, we did not have direct hits with either of them, but we certainly did experience less than, but similar to Jason flooding with Helene and wind and rain, and especially tornadoes with Milton, which affected a lot of our inland counties. So we also have a very different range of individuals that we serve. For example, Charlotte County contains a large number of retirees from up north and Inland County like Glades is probably a multi-generational agricultural community, much more rural. And because of that, because of the needs in coastal communities, the needs of different demographic communities are so different. You really have to adjust your response accordingly. So because of the large area that we cover, we’ve had to be very flexible in our response.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Peter, let’s stay with you. Florida Rural legal Services was greatly impacted previously by Hurricane Ian 2022. And as you’ve just described two years later by Hurricane Milton, what were the lessons learned from Ian and how did you apply those lessons to your work since Milton?

Peter Dennis:

Well, I mean it’s true. We were hit really hard by Ian. I mean, it wiped out entire communities. I lived relatively close to our office, and I will never forget the day after attempting to reach our office on foot only to unlock the door and realize that there was daylight shining into the office through the ceiling. So knew we were in for a long road. However, once we were able to figure out that our staff was safe, we were able to go into action fairly quickly. And admittedly, this was a steep learning curve for us, and we were really reliant on our fellow LSE grantees, many of whom came forward and offered all kinds of assistance. They offered assistance manning phones, what kind of resources we would need, providing a lot of basic information that quite frankly, we didn’t have that knowledge. We didn’t have that experience.

So it was really incredible to be able to rely on them as mentors. There’s a traditional answer like we learned about disaster resource centers or DRCs, and we were able to focus on outreach as many people couldn’t travel to us, but there probably is maybe a less traditional answer, which is equally important. And that is that we learned that you have to continually make the connections during what’s called blue skies if you’re going to get anything done during gray skies. We have continued since Ian, with the help of LSC, our hurricane preparedness work. We still have three attorneys that are doing solely hurricane recovery, Ian related work. We’re constantly doing community resilience work, which we think is really important and constantly doing education. So when Milton and Helene came through, I knew who to dial up from the Rolodex and we were able to communicate effectively to reach out to those other organizations that we partnered with be that the Red Cross or the United Way or the local long-term recovery groups that were hard hit. So one of the most important things that we learned is that disaster recovery is actually disaster preparedness, and that’s a year round activity, and it really isn’t optional anymore for many of us who not only live in coastal regions, but as you can see all over the country.

Ronald S. Flagg:

So I think there’s a couple lessons to be learned from your answer. One is collaboration. A decade ago if you’d asked disaster relief personnel around the country that is people who make their living working in responding to disasters in their communities, they might not have known about the contributions that legal aid can make a decade later that’s completely different as a result of the work of our four guests and others across the country. And second preparedness. Jason, let’s stay in Florida. And could you tell us about Florida’s disaster legal aid helpline? How did it come to be and what does it take to run that statewide service successfully?

Jason Susalla:

Certainly. So our helpline came about as we identified the need for a persistent access point for disaster survivors throughout the state and through LSCs generous funding, we were able to put up a statewide helpline for that purpose, focus on allowing disaster survivors to apply for legal assistance anywhere in the state. The basic idea behind it is that folks can call in again in Florida from wherever to receive some sort of to be screened and then to receive legal assistance based upon their needs. If they’re in our direct service area, then we can go ahead and provide extended services should they need it. If they call in from outside of our direct service area, then we will provide brief services, but should they need further assistance beyond that, we work with all our statewide partners, including Peter’s program there to make sure we refer cases to the survivors local legal aid programs so they can pick up that case and actually take it from there to provide those needed services to help people in their recovery.

That’s the general framework there of the helpline. We determined that a lot of our at risk and a lot of our vulnerable communities do not recover by any means at the same rate of others. And folks are having issues that crop up long after many traditional disaster resources have dried up or demobilized. So part of our helpline was to make sure that there was this persistent access throughout the entire year. Blue skies, gray skies, doesn’t matter. Folks could reach out to us at any point. So that kind of leads into what does it take to run, which I will say primarily of course is you need the appropriate staff based on whether the line is a message based, which ours was at first, and then in transitioning to a live line to make sure you have the capacity to handle influx of disaster survivors following incidents.

But to train those staff is very important because disaster survivors have a lot of other needs attached to their legal needs. We want to make sure to provide a holistic experience for these individuals coming in. So it’s important to know your disaster relief community to know what resources are out there to ensure that you are training your screening staff, your call center staff, et cetera, and your advocates to make sure along the way that they can identify these other non-legal needs to make sure to provide individuals with these other resources they may not have previously known about. I also benefit from the fact that Bay Area runs to other helplines that proceeded the disaster line. We have a statewide senior line and we have a statewide veterans line. So because of the institutional knowledge and existing framework, I sort of can rely on that to staff our disaster line.

And I will say too, when we started the call, volume on the line was rather low. I can’t say that’s the case anymore, very much so. We needed to identify capacity issues and rely upon our large screening department to ensure that folks are able to get in and receive actual someone on the line. It’s very important for us to connect with survivors immediately. We found that we could lose folks and messages and things like that. I would say lastly two, one good aspect, a very important aspect of running the statewide helpline is knowing the disaster relief community. A lot of what Peter said is extremely relevant regarding the helpline as well. When we first came into having a disaster relief program in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, we didn’t know a lot of the partners. The disaster relief community is a much different thing than many of the other traditional areas that legal aid is practiced in. So being able to engage that community and include yourself in discussions that you were previously not aware of is very important so that you can make sure to connect with relevant community partners and educate them because they’re going to be the ones who are on the front lines. Survivors are not typically going to identify they have legal issues upfront. They’re going to go to our traditional disaster resources, and those folks can be educated on exactly what sort of legal issues they should be looking out for and know to refer to us.

Ronald S. Flagg:

So again, the average person experiences a hurricane or a tornado or a wildfire, probably their first reaction is not to call for a lawyer, but what types of legal issues have cropped up in the aftermath of the recent hurricanes?

Jason Susalla:

So what we have observed here, number one is our call volume has increased exponentially. I’ll just get into that volume real quick. By the way, after Hurricane Debbie, we were chosen to host the DLS hotline for the state as well. FEMA started advertising our number as our legal service that folks could reach out to. This also happened for Haleem Milton. The DLS has not yet been activated, but FEMA’s already giving out our number. So folks are reaching out to us from all over, and the call volume is extremely high right now. What we are seeing in the immediate aftermath of these hurricanes are housing issues, I could say primarily right now, specifically what I mean are landlord tenant issues. We see folks here who are having issues with landlords doing rather nefarious things and not following what the law is whatsoever. Folks don’t know their rights. That’s a primary subject area we’re seeing in the call-ins. We’re also seeing, of course, a lot of questions about fema, FEMA assistance, appeals, overcoming information requests and things like that too. Now as time goes on, I can tell you generally what the trends we’ll see. We’ll start to morph as we go into long-term recovery. We’ll see more insurance issues crop up for homeowners. We will see contractor issues for contractors who are not doing what they should be doing, and that will morph into those sorts of longer term issues as time goes on.

Peter Dennis:

And Ron, if I could just follow up on something that Jason said that was really important that we learned is training for those people who are doing intake, there are so many issues that come up as a result of disaster recovery that you don’t usually look for when you’re doing an intake with someone. So understanding the sort of complex areas and what the services that people are able to access in your area is extremely important. And guiding people, people don’t know they’re, they’re in survival mode. They don’t know exactly what’s out there or what they need. And that’s why, as Jason said, training your intake people is so important so that they can find the issue spot and find those areas where assistance can be given.

Ronald S. Flagg:

So people who are doing intake are not only listening, but they’re educating. It’s sort of a iterative process where they’re asking questions that will elicit educate the people who are calling in for help and then gaining information that bears on the issues that the callers have identified. Peter, I’d like to ask you specifically about one aspect of the Florida Rural Legal Services service areas, and that is it includes a large agricultural worker population. What unique challenges to these agricultural worker communities? What do they face in disaster recovery and how has your program adopted its disaster response to meet those specific needs?

Peter Dennis:

Absolutely, and you can’t take the rural out of Florida Rural legal services. In fact, that was one of the main reasons that we were founded, was to respond to our migrant workers. And they face, they certainly are a more vulnerable population than other populations. One of the main things that we have an advantage in helping these individuals is that we happen to be located in the areas that they are in iley, in Bell Glade, these are places that have large numbers of migrant workers and outreach to those workers also isn’t on a nine to five basis. When they get ready to leave in the morning, that can often be very early 6:00 AM and they may not return until very late. So we’ve had to ensure that our outreach workers are working extended hours, but are also able to keep a work-life balance as well. And so that’s always a challenge.

Meeting our migrant workers can also be a challenge, making sure that you are available around the housing camps, but also you have to be a little creative. You have to be around places like Walmart or Laa or the laundromat places that are frequented by our agricultural workers because otherwise they’re not going to have a great deal of free time to be seeking out legal services, which many of them don’t even think that they’re entitled to. Even though all of the people that we serve are here. Legally, agricultural workers are particularly susceptible to disasters because when a disaster or disasters like these happen, they can wipe out an entire crop cycle. And when that happens, there isn’t work. And these aren’t often individuals whose visas allow them to go on alternative work or who may be trained to do other work. And so they also need to know about what unemployment benefits they may have if they have enough credit through the time that they’ve worked about programs like dsap. So a lot of it is education and education in their language, their native language and education that’s accessible to them. So accessibility is really one of the most important things that we can do to assist them.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Thanks, Lesley. You described the devastating effects of Hurricane Helene, particularly in Western North Carolina. Could you elaborate on the North Carolina Supreme Court’s decision to implement the So-called Katrina rule. What is the Katrina rule and what has the response been from out-of-state attorneys thus far?

Lesley Albritton :

I’m really excited to be asked this question because as devastating as natural disasters are, I do think this is an area where the legal profession really shines in seeing a need and leaping to fill it. So this is sort of a bright spot for me and what is otherwise sort of an overwhelming situation. I want to say that something that’s a little unique, I think about legal aid of North Carolina to my colleagues who are also on the podcast, is that we serve all 100 counties of North Carolina, and we have relatively few staff members to do that. The western part of our state is of course, quite remote. We do have attorneys who live and work in those communities. We have five attorneys who are dedicated to disaster relief work exclusively, and a wonderful team of dedicated paralegals, but that simply is not enough to handle the need.

And in response to that, the chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court has issued a Katrina ruling, and the Katrina rule dates back, of course to Hurricane Katrina, and it allows a state supreme court or state bar to expand and suspend rules against outside practice and the ability to waive into a state. And what our Katrina rule for Helene says is that out-of-state lawyers who register can immediately start to provide pro bono assistance to victims of Helene as long as they qualify as indigent and as long as they’re working and practicing under the supervision of a legal services organization. So that allows legal aid of North Carolina to work with these out-of-state attorneys to help expand our reach to address the extreme needs legal needs that we’re seeing from Helene. And the other wonderful part about it is that it gives us an opportunity to really educate attorneys who may not live in a state that experiences natural disasters as frequently as we do, although we know those states are becoming more rare about the needs that we see so we can deploy them again in other disasters.

I’m really excited to say that I asked our pro bono director this morning to give me the most recent numbers, and as of today, we have 590 out-of-State attorneys registered to provide legal services, and they’re doing a variety of things under that order. They are providing direct services to clients where we refer them cases, but they’re also in some circumstances helping us staff those FEMA disaster recovery centers to provide legal information to victims who can make it to those centers in their communities. We’re really grateful for those attorneys and for the fact that they want to help out.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Lesley, I’m with you. If we’re looking for a positive sign in all of this devastation and destruction, the fact that close to 600 attorneys from outside of North Carolina have volunteered to help people in North Carolina is truly both remarkable and encouraging. And Mike, you and Georgia Legal Services have a lot of experience with pro bono. What strategies have been most effective in engaging pro bono attorneys for disaster response in Georgia?

Mike Monahan:

Well, we reorganized our pro bono programming starting about five years ago and pretty much finished that work about a year and a half ago. And what we did is we took what was a group of part-time, mostly part-time, pro bono people in different places around the state, turned them into full-time and then added a whole bunch of lawyers. So we have a pro bono team of around 15, a core of 15, mostly full-time people now including eight lawyers of management. And then we have another five to six to eight people who floated in from other units to provide some specialized expertise in the areas like housing and unemployment, et cetera, public benefits. And we also have intake staff who come over and help us and teach us things and help us move through the system. But we moved disaster legal assistance into our pro bono team because our staff attorneys over the years have had difficult experiences breaking free from grants and the court work they were already involved in to be able to fully engage disaster survivors and households needing all different kinds of legal services and assistance.

So we are in a much better position this year than we’ve ever been to handle these things. And the team of 20 has been working full-time just on disaster legal assistance since the day after Hurricane Helene passed through. We didn’t even wait for the declaration. We work closely with the state bar of Georgia. In fact, my office is embedded in the state bar and has been down there for 20 plus years, and they give us money, they give us access to the sections, they give us access to committees and communications and theBar Journal and Bar eNews and news blasts and to recruitment, really strong recruitment possibilities for volunteer lawyers. So in the first couple of weeks, we recruited 400 volunteer lawyers through training, and so we’ve been able to convert. We don’t have a live disaster legal hotline. Now it’s open year round, it never closes.

However, it’s all voicemail based. And so this is the first time we’ve had to deal with this kind of volume and so far we’ve converted a hundred and, pardon me, 1,023 voicemails into pre-screens and now we’re placing cases, et cetera. The earliest days our team delivered services before the disaster declaration through pro bono by answering all the food and food replacement questions because that was the bulk of the questions in rural George, like no electricity, no food, no way to swipe card or to do anything online to get food. And so people really depended on learning where the shelters were. The organizations that are first on the ground like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army are who provided housing and showers and food. So we spent a lot of time doing that and then we were gearing up half the team did much of that work.

The other half is working on other issues including the developing the approach. So what we did is we went to the state bar and we worked closely with the YD, the younger lawyers division of the state bar whom we’ve always worked with on disaster legal services, got the hotline going, process messages, and then started recruiting. We launched with their help, a statewide volunteer disaster law training, and we had over 300 attendees of that disaster law training. Then we also have a disaster law, which we replicated from North Carolina, south Florida, and I believe Texas. And of course our disaster law manual gives credit to all those because it’s always an iterative process. Every time there’s a disaster somewhere, it’s a chance to learn something and added into your stores as a legal aid provider. So our staff attorneys have been doing their own work and joining in when they can have some free time.

So it’s really opened up a lot more possibilities. Now, what we also do with the state bar is we access the sections. My office is about, I don’t know, 30 steps from the sections director of the state bar, and we have like 34 sections of the state bar. So we sent blast email messages, recruiting lawyers, and the message is important. So it’s two things. The network plus the message and the message really has to tell a simple story, very simple story about the problem and relay and emotional connection that’s kind of that rests in that you can do this and we can help posture. So we provide the disaster law manual, the forms that we want them to use, that we’ve developed a Google based sort of focus so people can come in and grab what they need when they need it, IR respectful of which kind of platform they might be using in their own offices.

And many of those sections gave us all of those lawyers. Insurance law, fiduciary, real property law section list kind of goes on and on. theBar, mandatory state bars have a wealth of resources, and I also have access to the membership department database so I can look and see where lawyers are. So we don’t waste our time trying to recruit in areas that don’t have any lawyers. Most of our work is virtual. We’ve designed our system to be virtual so that volunteer lawyers can come in from the big firms in Atlanta and serve those other 61 rural or small city areas of the state that are under the disaster declaration. That’s really important because the lawyers in those areas were already getting assistance from the state bar because their offices were closed. The state bar sold US committee was sending down supplies, pens and paper and food and et cetera to lawyers to help them and their families and their households recover. And meanwhile, the other lawyers in the state chipped in and started moving forward. And so the state bar messaged a great deal of that to the legal community and to our stakeholders and partners around the state and got our statewide website sort of up and going, which provided the basic information of how to find us and how to apply

Ronald S. Flagg:

Mike. In a prior life, I was the chair of a pro bono committee at a large firm Sidley Austin, and trying to persuade antitrust lawyers and corporate lawyers and tax lawyers to take on a housing case or a family case that required some effort. What have you found most effective in helping pro bono attorneys to feel confident in handling disaster related cases? Do you have any guidance for attorneys looking to get involved?

Mike Monahan:

I’m not sure if it’s guidance for the attorneys themselves, but I had a similar problem way back. And then about four and a half years ago, pro bono contacts at three major firms in Atlanta national law firms, one international came to us and said, bless your hearts, you need some help with this disaster assistance. And so we formed what we call Georgia Team Ready. So our founding law firms for our Georgia Team Ready program were Kilpatrick Townsend, Austin and Bird Troutman Pepper, and now we have King and Spalding and Nelson Mullins and a couple of other law firms. And I’m so sorry I’m not mentioning all of the law firms. It’s a danger to go out there, but they are our contacts in the big firms and they tell their lawyers, Hey, we are the bridge here and we know you can trust these people to support you, and we can help you do pro bono even if you’ve never touched, never been in court, if you’ve never picked up a phone and talked to an actual client, their own pro bono people can help facilitate that with our support.

So we developed a manual, we developed scripts for those lawyers. We developed advice sheets that they can fill out, keep things simple. And the bottom line is we tell the story that people who call in a disaster just about to have a moment here, they just want someone to listen to them and validate them and let them know that they’re not alone. And then from that point, once they’re enabled and they feel like they can trust you, then whatever you do for them is super, super appreciated. We offer professional liability insurance, which is always important to mention to anyone who works in corporate counsel or the large law firm. We’ve got ’em covered on that. We do a lot of handholding. I’ve got eight lawyers on my pro bono team to do a lot of handholding. We’ve got the law firm contacts, and so we try to make it very comfortable and we make ourselves accessible.

In fact, I give everyone my cell phone number, they can call me anytime, and most of our staff use our cell phones consistently so people don’t have to wait between nine and five or whatever. People can just call me or email me anytime, and I answer. And our team is the same way. We’re very approachable that way. So positioning your disaster team to be available to the big firms is really important. And these big firms are not just about, they talk to me. I mean, frequently they’ll tell us, oh, we’re working in North Carolina or we’re working in Puerto Rico, or we did FEMA appeals in Florida. We could do the same here in Georgia. And if anyone calls you from North Carolina somewhere, you can send, give them our name, any program and give them our name and we’ll try and see if we can help them. So they’re not Atlanta firms Legal aid programs need to understand that they’re not tied by geography and they’ve got systems in place. And we’ve often had help from not just the lawyers, but the support staff, secretaries of administrative support, paralegals and paralegals. Law firm paralegals are miracle workers. I want to praise big law firm paralegals in a disaster because they take the tools that you give them and they make them better for you. So if anytime you could involve large law firm paralegals, I highly recommend it.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Thank you. One thing I always told our lawyers who might be reluctant if they were not experts in housing or family laws, the alternative is not Clarence Darrow. Clarence Darrow is not going to represent this person in Landlord Tenant Court. The alternative is they’re going to represent themselves and typically not very effectively or well, Lesley, having taken a look at Legal Aid of North Carolina’s webpage for Hurricane Helene, and you can find that@legalaidnc.org. It’s really a very impressive and thorough collection of resources for all sorts of services people may need after disaster. For example, links to information about road conditions, help finding open pharmacies and mental health support. It looks like your organization views its role as not just a legal services provider. And if it’s not legal services, goodbye, go find it elsewhere. But really a community resource. I talked about collaboration before and how important that is throughout legal aid work, but particularly with regard to disaster. Could you talk about that?

Lesley Albritton :

Well, first of all, big shout out to our communications director, Helen Hobson, who has made our website absolutely beautiful and accessible for people regardless of the language that they speak or their familiarity with legal issues. We’re really grateful to have her on our team. And as I think you’re alluding to, it does not stop at our website. One thing that we have learned over and over again in responding to natural disasters is that for survivors, the road to recovery is really long as we all know, and it’s also confusing and not very straightforward. So to the extent that we can be sort of a one-stop shop for where people get information that they can trust, it’s really beneficial to our clients. And the more we get our name out in the communities that we serve, that we do this type of work, the more people do trust us and do come to our website for that type of information.

It also benefits us. It helps us to develop relationships. I think all of my colleagues have discussed how important it is to have relationships at every level in the disaster recovery community. So that’s the federal and the state level. It’s local government, and it’s also the other volunteer organizations who respond to disasters. So we have built up that network over the years. Another good thing to come out of all the repeated disasters that have hit North Carolina is that we’ve really gotten entrenched those communities of people who are concerned about this work. And so what we try to do is while we’re addressing our client’s legal issues, we try to meet their other needs to the extent possible. So our website has many resources, and then we know where to find the things that our clients need, and some examples of those, some real client examples I can give you.

After Hurricane Florence, through our partnership with the North Carolina voad, which is North Carolina organization, voluntary organizations active in disasters, we were able to deal with client’s legal needs, but also do things like get them furniture for their new homes through those connections. Or for one client find a wheelchair that she needed. She had the wheelchair ramp, but she didn’t have the wheelchair. So we were able to find that through other volunteer organizations. And we had a client who really, he’s one of my favorite clients who we’ve ever served, just a lovely gentleman who lived in Newburgh, North Carolina, and he lived in a home that was air property. So in other words, he’d lived in this home since childhood. He inherited from his parents, but because of the way that he inherited it without the benefit of a will or a deed, he didn’t have the documentation he needed to prove that he owned it, and so therefore, he couldn’t get access to recovery dollars to rebuild that home.

So while our attorneys were working with this client to help him get the documentation he needed to show that he owned the home, we were also able to connect him with another volunteer organization to help with that rebuilding process and ultimately work together to get the legal work done. So now he’s in a great position if he’s ever impacted again, and our attorneys and our paralegals got so invested in this client that they actually went out and helped start to rebuild his home, which was just a lovely moment where we all got together. I’m happy to say he’s been in the house for three years now, but those are the types of connections that we try to provide not only through our website, but through the networks that we’ve built in responding to disasters, and it’s really meaningful for our clients, and it’s honestly for me, what makes this work so meaningful in and of itself that we’re able to provide those holistic services for our clients.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Well, I can’t think of a better way to end this podcast. Legal Aid ultimately is about serving clients. So talking at the level of an individual client about the impact the lifesaving, certainly life altering impact of legal aid is a great place to end. Lesley, Peter, Mike, Jason, thank you all for joining me on this podcast during what I know is a hectic time, and more importantly, thank you and for your phenomenal and highly impactful disaster response work. Many thanks to our listeners for tuning in to this episode of Talk Justice. Please subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. In the meantime, stay well.

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