Robert Ambrogi Blog
Twenty years ago today, on Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the city of New Orleans and surrounding parishes. Eighty percent of the city was flooded, many people died, and many others lost their homes.
For many of us, the images from those awful days are seared into our collective memory – the broken levees, the crowded Superdome, the rooftop rescues, the human suffering on an unimaginable scale.
Among those impacted were many of the region’s lawyers and law firms, and part of what stays with me to this day is how the relatively fledgling legal tech industry – not to mention the broader legal community – rallied to help.
Looking back through my coverage from 2005, I’m struck by how quickly and creatively the legal tech community mobilized, sometimes in ways that might seem quaint by today’s technology standards but were forward-thinking for their time.
The Immediate Devastation
The scope of destruction to the legal infrastructure was staggering. Fisher & Phillips’ New Orleans office sat empty on the 37th floor of a flooded downtown building, with its then managing partner Roger Quillen learning about the damage from photographs of the nearby Hyatt Regency showing “scores of shattered windows with curtains fluttering in the wind.” The firm could not even get into its office to directly assess the damage and had to keep it closed for at least another two weeks.
Against this backdrop of devastation, the legal community acted quickly to use the web and other resources and organize responses that might have taken months to coordinate even just a few years earlier.
After all, this was 2005 – the iPhone had yet to be invented, blogs were still relatively new, social media was in its infancy, and cloud computing was barely a concept. Yet the legal tech community leveraged the tools it had available to help.
Information as Lifeline
Leading the charge were law librarians, doing what they do best. Members of the American Association of Law Libraries quickly launched “AALL LawLibAssist,” a blog dedicated to helping their colleagues, the attorneys they served, and law school students in the affected areas.
As law librarian Kathie Sullivan told me at the time, “We’re hoping that what we do best as a profession – manage information – will be of some help right now.”
Again, consider the times. Physical law libraries were still very much a thing. With physical law libraries underwater and legal research systems offline, having organized, accessible information might literally have meant the difference between being able to practice law and being professionally paralyzed.
The ABA moved quickly too, establishing a comprehensive Hurricane Katrina Disaster Recovery Resources website that provided information on relief efforts, allowed lawyers to volunteer legal assistance and office space, and included sections for lawyers needing help, victims and their families, lawyers wanting to volunteer, and military personnel needing legal assistance.
Fred Faulkner, then the ABA’s webmaster (yes, webmaster used to be a job), expected the site to exist for a full year – recognizing this wasn’t a short-term crisis but a long-term rebuilding effort.
Legal Tech Vendors Step Up
Also stepping up to help were major legal technology companies. LexisNexis, for one, made its Hurricane Katrina news coverage free to non-subscribers, pulling from more than 4,000 U.S. and international news sources.
Smaller legal tech companies also showed their heart. Kevin O’Keefe and his company LexBlog offered free blogs to law firms impacted by the hurricane and to groups organizing relief efforts, understanding that “right now may not be business as usual” and providing both public and password-protected for external or internal communications.
Again, remember the times: This was when blogs were cutting-edge technology for law firms – most didn’t even have them yet.
A then recently launched legal research company called Jurix Prudent, led by a former Cravath associate and a former law clerk to India’s chief justice, donated free legal research hours to displaced lawyers, despite itself being limited in resources as a startup.
Grassroots Tech Mobilization
Perhaps most impressive was the grassroots organizing. Ross Kodner – long a giant as a consultant and thought leader in the legal tech who died in 2013 – and Dale Tincher, president and CEO at Consultwebs, spearheaded “Help Katrina Lawyers.”
The website pulled together volunteers and resources to help Gulf Coast law firms with legal technology, practice management and disaster recovery. The site emerged from what Kodner described at the time as “a small army of volunteers from the ranks of lawyers, legal vendors, consultants and others.”
The goal, he said, was to “marshall resources tapping our legal technology, law practice management and disaster/data recovery skills so Katrina-affected lawyers can find this information on one consolidated site.”
(Kodner and Tincher had previously mobilized a similar effort in the aftermath of 9/11.)
At a time when mobile phones were yet to be ubiquitous and the iPhone had yet to be invented, creating a centralized resource like this required enormous coordination and commitment.
Help Providing Legal Help
The response wasn’t just about helping lawyers and law firms – it was also about enabling the legal system to better serve disaster victims.
For example, the New Orleans Coalition for Legal Aid and Disaster Relief, developed through Tulane Law School’s efforts, created online forms for those needing legal help to request it and for lawyers to volunteer assistance, while also planning to serve as a watchdog to ensure equitable distribution of public and private resources.
Elsewhere, the “Lend-A-Lawyer” program, organized by Texas Appleseed and the Texas Equal Access to Justice Foundation with support from the firm then called Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, created a rotating fellowship system where major law firms would lend associates to staff legal aid offices, hotlines, and referral services. This sort of thing was nowhere near common at the time.
Podcast Coverage
At the time, I was cohost of the Lawyer2Lawyer podcast, then called Coast to Coast, along with J. Craig Williams, and we devoted an episode to Katrina, Katrina’s Aftermath: The Gulf Coast Legal Community.
In the first half of the program, we heard compelling first-hand accounts from Louisiana attorneys Ernie Svenson (aka Ernie the Attorney) and Raymond P. Ward, both of whom had to relocate their practices for a period of time.
They talked about how displaced lawyers were finding ways to reconnect with clients, maintain court obligations, and rebuild practices using technology such as emergency email systems and document management platforms.
In the second half, we turned to Texas, where the legal community literally opened its doors to welcome lawyers who fled Katrina’s path. We talked to then-Texas State Supreme Court Justice Dale Wainwright, then State Bar of Texas President Eduardo Roberto Rodriguez and former State Bar President Kelly Frels, who chaired the bar’s task force on Katrina relief.
They discussed the Texas Supreme Court’s emergency order allowing displaced Gulf Coast lawyers to practice temporarily in Texas without facing unauthorized practice restrictions. They also shared how their task force coordinated housing, office space, technology resources and even school placements for families.
(Within a week of the hurricane, Texas lawyers had donated over 100,000 square feet of office space and offered homes to their displaced colleagues from Louisiana.)
Would We Respond the Same Today?
When this disaster happened 20 years ago, the legal tech industry and the legal profession at large did not just offer thoughts and prayers – they organized, they built systems, they created solutions. They leveraged whatever technology they had available to help their colleagues in need.
Looking back, what seems most remarkable isn’t the technology, but how quickly the community recognized that technology could be a force multiplier in that time of need. Compared to today, the legal tech industry of 2005 was barely a recognizable sector, but when Katrina hit, the community proved it had both the technical skills and the professional commitment to make a difference.
As I sit here writing this 20 years later, I wonder: Would our response to such a disaster today be as immediate, as innovative, and as community-driven? Or has our industry become so big and so sophisticated that we’ve lost some of that scrappy, all-hands-on-deck spirit that made the 2005 response so notable?
When the next disaster comes, the tools we have available to us will be different. But the heart, I hope, will be the same.