Law students on a mission: UNC law group wins pro bono award for annual Katrina relief work

It still isn’t easy to get help in The Big Easy.
More than three years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, many devastated residents continue to struggle with a litany of legal disputes most involving property that have left them hamstrung, unable to receive the aid they need to rebuild their lives.
But thanks to a group of UNC law students, some families may now be on the road to reconstruction.
Ever since Katrina struck in 2005, student volunteers have given up a week of their winter breaks to work with the Pro Bono Project, a Louisiana nonprofit that has been helping New Orleans residents resolve succession, heirs’ property and family law issues.
UNC was the first law school to send students after the storm struck, said Sandie McCarthy-Brown, case and volunteer coordinator for the agency.
It is also the only North Carolina law school that works with the Pro Bono Project. Thirty-two other law schools across the country also send students to assist the agency each year.
But UNC’s commitment has been extraordinary, McCarthy-Brown said.
That’s why it was honored with the Pro Bono Law School of the Year award from the nonprofit earlier this month. The school also received the award in 2006.
“[UNC students] were the first to offer help after the hurricane and they did anything we asked them to do,” McCarthy-Brown said. “Their first trip down, we had them pull files, which is basically physical labor. They also called all of our clients and attorneys to see who they could locate. After Katrina, everyone was scattered.
“And every single break, they continue to send students. Just the sheer impact of their commitment has been very important for us.”

‘A living tradition’
Diane Standaert spearheaded the Katrina initiative when she was a law student at UNC.
“I think we were all stunned by what we were seeing and hearing in the wake of the storm the poverty and inequality,” said Standaert, who now works for the Center for Responsible Lending in Raleigh. “A large number of us felt that we were in a capacity to do something rather than watching it on TV or reading about it in the newspaper.”
Because it was the first time that UNC law students coordinated an out-of-state trip to respond to a natural disaster, the pilot group pulled together each component of the program in a patchwork fashion, Standaert told North Carolina Lawyers Weekly.
There was also little time to plan. Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, and UNC volunteers landed on the Pro Bono Project’s doorstep that December.
The pioneer team of 20 students camped out at the home of classmate Timothy Goodson’s parents in Metairie, a New Orleans suburb. Two feet of water had flooded the first floor of the house during the hurricane.
“They brought their own food and worked all day,” said Goodson, who did not volunteer because he was helping his family recover from the storm.
“I think Carolina Law has a long history of public service, and I was really proud to see the law school demonstrate that it’s still a living tradition. I think the work they did in New Orleans was an example of that,” he said.
“It was triage,” Standaert recalled. “The Pro Bono Project said, ‘Yes, come. We need help.’ All we knew was that we needed to bring our laptops and our cell phones. Other than that, we did not know what we would be doing, and I don’t know that the [Pro Bono] Project did either.”
Indeed, it was chaotic, McCarthy-Brown, the volunteer coordinator, said. After the hurricane, the Pro Bono Project lost six of its seven staff members, who included lawyers.
“We didn’t know if we had attorneys. We didn’t know if we had clients. [UNC students] did all the file-pulling and reorganized our file system into a better one than what we had,” McCarthy-Brown said.
“It wasn’t the most substantive legal work the first time around,” Standaert remembered. “But it was still a very powerful trip. We were able to catch snapshots of what life was like in the aftermath of the storm.”

Grassroots effort
More than 100 students have participated in the Katrina program since its inception, with around 15-20 volunteers per trip, according to Sylvia Novinsky, assistant dean for public service programs at UNC’s law school.
Last week, 22 students headed south to help tackle the 1,400 open cases that the Pro Bono Project is handling.
Coordinating the trip is entirely a student effort, with volunteers raising the funds $10,000 for this year’s visit on their own.
“[They did] letter writing, fund-raisers … they’ve sold water bottles, they’ve sold T-shirts. They had a fund-raiser at a bar,” Novinsky said. “They’ve done it all, and people have given parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, neighbors, doctors, dentists, people from their churches.”
But this year, one type of donor was absent from the pool law firms.
“It is a disappointment,” said Novinsky, who said that she did not know why firms may have opted out this year.
But one bright spot has been the partnership that UNC volunteers forged with Kilpatrick Stockton for the Katrina effort, both Novinsky and McCarthy-Brown said.
The firm’s pro bono partner, Debbie Segal of Atlanta, initially helped the Pro Bono Project develop its system to coordinate student volunteers in the months following the storm.
“Everyone was in crisis mode,” Segal said. “I think all seemed to be suffering from some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder. Here they had all of this probate work in front of them, and each person who came in had to tell their story, which could take hours.
“I think it’s taken longer than anyone expected. We, who are on the outside looking in, do not have the comprehension of how difficult it was to live through something like that, and it’s not something you snap out of quickly.”
Today, Kilpatrick Stockton sends two volunteer attorneys to supervise the UNC students each year.
Thanks to its efforts, the Pro Bono Project named Kilpatrick Stockton its Pro Bono Law Firm of the Year in 2006.
Rebuild, renew, reinvent
With each journey to New Orleans, UNC volunteers and the Pro Bono Project aim to find new ways to assist residents in need.
Seema Kakad, the student director of last week’s trip, said she wanted to broaden the range of student experiences this time around.
Instead of working solely on succession and family law cases, some students tackled criminal work in the Orleans Public Defenders office.
A Spanish-speaking student was based in the Pro Bono Project’s employment law unit, which resolves wage cases for immigrants who were hired as day laborers after Katrina and then not paid for their work
“I think adding the criminal work gives people more areas to choose and experiment with,” said Kakad, who also went to New Orleans in 2007. “We wanted to generate a real buzz to get people excited about this.”
It worked.
According to Novinsky, more than 40 students applied to participate in the trip. Volunteers are ultimately selected based on a lottery and essay.
Kakad called the experience a “reality check.”
“It’s a different kind of poverty,” she said. “I’ve traveled and been out of the country. But it’s a different kind of desperation there than I’ve ever seen, in North Carolina at least.”
By the end of the week, UNC students had completed 1,200 hours of pro bono work in New Orleans.
With that help, McCarthy-Brown said that the Pro Bono Project has slowly been able to chip away at the backlog of cases that developed after Katrina.
“We have a larger staff [of 12] now, but with that comes a larger demand,” she said. “It’s still crazy here, but it’s a normal kind of crazy and chaos.”

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