SOS For Iowa Lawyers

I turn the mic over to Tom O'Connor, and his TechnoGumbo blog:

Ernie Svenson has a post on his blog today with pointers to the Linn County Bar Association which includes Cedar Rapids, a city hard hit by the recent flooding and location of the Linn County District Court. Despite the flooding, the Linn County Bar is still planning to proceed with its annual meeting this coming Thursday, June 26 and several members of the Law Practice Management Section of the ABA, led by Jim Calloway of the Oklahoma Bar,  J.R. Phelps of the Florida Bar, Catherine Sanders Reach of the ABA LTRC and myself, are planning to participate via video conference.

I was also asked to do a short article on recovery efforts in New Orleans immediately after the hurricanes here three years ago and as part of that article I had a conversation with Helena Henderson, Executive Director of the New Orleans Bar Association.

Helena was a mainstay of relief effrots in the New Orleans legal community after Katiranas she on the phone with the ABA organizing relief efforts on Aug 30, one day after the storm, had the NOBA web site back on line immediately and was back in town herself in October, relentelssly working to get the legal community, including the local court system, back in place.

Her advice for the immediate aftermath of a large disaster was basic: “get a single point of contact and send money.”  Her experience showed that the fastest immediate relief could be provided by a single agency (in her case, the NO Bar in associaiton with the ABA) coodridnating to contact local attorneys and provide them with immediate monetary assistance to get shelter, food and medical care if needed.

So contact the Linn County Bar . They have a resource page for Flood Information, as well as a ‘Displaced Attorney Contact‘ page.  The ABA also has information numbers on their Disaster Recovery site as well as articles on disaster recovery including several written by J.R. Phelps. I’ll post more here as the week progresses including more of my interview with Helena Henderson and others in the New Orleans local legal community.