Delivering Legal Aid after Katrina

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Abstract

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita led to a myriad of legal needs in the Gulf Coast area at a time when the region's legal infrastructure was weakened. Equal Justice Works implemented the Katrina Legal Initiative, an innovative legal aid disaster relief program to assist the affected communities. This report details the implementation of this program; describes the program goals, activities, and impacts; analyzes whether the program met the stated goals; and offers recommendations for comparable programs in the future. Lessons learned from the Katrina Legal Initiative can help to inform future disaster relief efforts on the part of the legal community.

Introduction

On August 29th, 2005, the United States Gulf Coast experienced the most destructive hurricane in the nation's history. After a previous landfall in Florida, Hurricane Katrina hit land for the second time in southeast Louisiana in Plaquemines Parish near Buras, Louisiana, tearing through Louisiana and Mississippi and inflicting an estimated $81 billion to $125 billion of damage across the United States and as far north as Quebec. The deaths of more than 1,8002 individuals were attributed to Hurricane Katrina, although the exact number remains unknown due to an outstanding number of missing persons. Vulnerable communities in southern Louisiana and Mississippi were thrown into crisis as they took the brunt of the storm and experienced devastating post-storm impacts such as the breaking of levees in New Orleans. Less than a month later on September 24th, 2005, another storm, Hurricane Rita, hit the Gulf Coast along the Louisiana-Texas border between Sabine Pass, Texas and Johnson's Bayou, Louisiana. Hurricane Rita bombarded communities still recovering from Hurricane Katrina, causing an estimated $10 billion of damage and killing at least 62 people. After the devastation of these communities, those affected by the hurricanes had a myriad of legal needs in addition to basic survival needs. Many local attorneys, however, were displaced, and legal infrastructures in many communities were wiped out due to limited staff support and lack of office space, funding, electricity, and technological resources.

Equal Justice Works, a non-profit organization located in Washington, D.C., administers various programs to place both attorneys and law students in public interest organizations. The organization provides lawyers and legal support to needy communities through Equal Justice Works Fellowships, AmeriCorps Legal Fellowships, and a Summer Corps program. Already equipped with this role and experience, Equal Justice Works was well-positioned to implement similar programs to provide additional legal assistance to residents in the hurricane-affected areas. Soon after the hurricanes hit, Equal Justice Works sent a consultant to travel through the affected areas to perform a needs assessment, to identify the most pressing legal needs, and to learn about the status of the legal aid infrastructure throughout the devastated area. Equal Justice Works then began investigating how to best address those needs. Through the acquisition of additional resources, Equal Justice Works implemented an innovative legal aid disaster relief program to assist a number of the communities affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The program, designated the Katrina Legal Initiative (KLI), was comprised of three components: the Katrina Legal Fellowship program, the AmeriCorps Legal Fellowship program, and the Summer Corps program. The Katrina and AmeriCorps Legal Fellowships provided funding for public interest legal organizations in the Gulf Coast region to serve as host sites for both local and out-of-state attorneys. The Summer Corps program provided AmeriCorps education award vouchers to first- and second-year law students for service within public interest legal agencies during the summer. In total, 125 attorneys and law students were placed by the Katrina Legal Initiative in the Gulf Coast region to assist those affected by the disasters.

The Urban Institute was contracted by Equal Justice Works to evaluate the Katrina Legal Initiative. The purpose of the current report is to describe the evaluation of the three components of the Katrina Legal Initiative and to highlight findings from this study. This report details the implementation of the Katrina Legal Initiative; describes the program goals, activities, and impacts of the three programs; analyzes whether the programs met the stated goals; and offers recommendations for comparable programs in the future.

Methodology

To document the scope and nature of the Katrina Legal Initiative, researchers at the Urban Institute gathered information between July 2008 and June 2009 from multiple sources, including data collected by Equal Justice Works throughout program duration, interviews and focus groups with program participants and stakeholders, and observations of five host organizations where Fellows and Summer Corps members were placed.

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