The Lawyers Weekly - September 9, 2011

BUSINESS
CAREERS

CHRISTOPHER GULY

Are you prepared if disaster strikes?

Former Canadian Bar Association president Rod Snow believes the CBA could follow the lead taken by the American Bar Association(ABA) in placing great emphasis on disaster preparedness.

“We should be asking ourselves
whether we are prepared and if
there is more we should be doing,
both as an organization that helps
articulate best practices through
the work we do, and individual
members — whether in-house or
in private practice working in
large firms or as sole practition-
ers,” said Snow, a partner and
corporate commercial solicitor
with Davis LLP in Whitehorse.

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border for representing former U.S. vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in the landmark and controversial U.S. Supreme Court case, Bush v. Gore 531 U.S. 98 (2000) — was instrumental in creating that practice directive.

When Katrina struck its devastating blow on Louisiana in 2005, he served as chair of the House of Delegates — the second-ranking officer in the ABA just behind the president, who at the time was Michael Greco and was out of the country.

“I couldn’t reach friends of mine in Louisiana to know whether they were dead or alive,” says Zack, administrative partner with Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP in Miami.

So the ABA and LexisNexis, the publisher of The Lawyers Weekly, Martindale-Hubbell established a message board for lawyers and firms to post their relocation information in the wake of Katrina.

To make matters worse, Louisi-
ana’s legal system shut down—
“something we hadn’t thought
about and weren’t prepared for as
a profession,” explains Zack. “Jails
closed, so there was no way of
keeping people incarcerated, and
courts closed, so there was no way
of proceeding with legal matters.”
Documents — necessary for the
prosecution of cases—along with
court records were destroyed.

“Then on top of it, thousands of lawyers from around the country wanted to provide pro bono legal services, but the Louisiana Supreme Court said they couldn’t come because that would constitute the unauthorized practice of law,” recalls Zack.

Following pressure from the ABA, the state’s high court— along with its counterpart in Katrina-stricken Mississippi — enacted special rules to allow out-of-state lawyers to temporarily practise in those two states and help hurricane victims. In 2007, the ABA’s House of Delegates established the Katrina rule and soon after, Zack appointed New Orleans lawyer David Bienvenu — whom he was trying to reach in the aftermath of Katrina—as chair of the ABA’s Special Committee on Disaster Response and Preparedness.

During his recent term as president, Zack asked the committee to design a disaster preparedness protocol dealing with everything from network interruptions within the ABA to more widespread situations that shut down communication between lawyers, courts and clients.