Insurance

The Gulf Coast Legal Community: A Footnote To The History Of Hurricane Katrina

Reflecting on the legal community's response to Hurricane Katrina.

By  
on

“Oh shit.”

The words that fell out of my mouth the morning my wife told me that she was pregnant with our first child. I probably was not the first father to utter such prose in response to the news. But my reaction came from a slightly different place.

My daughter, Emerson, was very much planned. The responsible adult boxes had all been checked. Get married. Check. Graduate from law school. Check. Take the bar. Check. Get a job. Check.

But then came Hurricane Katrina. We had not factored her into our plans. We found out that we were to be first time parents the day after the levees broke. We watched from afar as New Orleans filled with water. Suddenly, our future looked a lot less clear. “Oh shit,” was the best I could muster in response to the news of my wife’s pregnancy.

Did we still have a home? So much of the city had been wiped out. We were fortunate to be young and unencumbered by a life’s worth of possessions. But what would we do if the little we had were lost?

I had just sat in the Louisiana Superdome a couple of months before taking the bar. The exams were still being graded. The Superdome with its torn and tattered roof was now a symbol of something much different.

I had no idea if I still had a job. I had been working with my firm for only a week when Katrina blew through. My first Friday was spent covering office equipment with sheets of plastic in the event that the roof was blown off.

Sponsored

Hurricane Rita rolled in a month after Katrina and dealt the Gulf Coast another blow. Roofless homes and office buildings were water logged again from the torrential rains. The slow slog back towards normalcy got even slower.

The weeks and months that followed are now thankfully a blur. Our little family was very fortunate in comparison to so many others.

With each passing anniversary of what is simply referred to down here as “the storm,” I find myself reflecting upon how that event shaped both my personal and professional life.

Much like how my daughter grew in her mother’s womb in a post Hurricane Katrina reality, I was birthed as a baby lawyer into the strange and unprecedented world of a modern American city recovering from total annihilation.

I spent the first years of my practice litigating the first party property insurance cases that followed Hurricane Katrina. Homeowners and businesses that dutifully paid their premiums each year found themselves stiffed by their insurers after the storm. Small businesses, large businesses, poor homeowners, wealthy homeowners, the problem spanned across the community.

Sponsored

The territory of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana includes New Orleans and most of the communities in Louisiana hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina. Approximately 15,545 Katrina related lawsuits were filed in that court. Some of those lawsuits were class actions that encompassed thousands of individual claimants.

In addition to thousands of suits filed in federal court, there were even more Katrina suits filed in state courts across southeast Louisiana. Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida had Katrina cases of their own.

All of these cases were litigated by local attorneys and adjudicated by courts along the Gulf Coast in relatively short order. Millions of dollars were recovered from insurers that went towards rebuilding the region and lessening the financial burden placed upon the federal government.

Weary judges, lawyers (both plaintiff and defense), court staff, paralegals, secretaries, court reporters, etc. who were busy rebuilding their own lives, worked tirelessly to give the influx of new litigants their day in court.

Trial dates piled on top of trial dates. Expert inspections of damaged property. Claims files produced. Adjusting manuals produced. Thousands of depositions. Corporate depositions of insurance executives. Depositions of insurance adjusters scattered all over the country. Depositions of individual homeowners who had not yet returned home. Depositions of accountants that calculated business interruption losses. Depositions of meteorologists that opined on wind speeds and the timing of the levee breaches. Motions to compel. Court mandated settlement conferences. Private mediations.

The American legal system worked well for the residents of the Gulf Coast in the most trying of times.

The history of Hurricane Katrina continues to be written from virtually every angle. The scientific history. The political history. The social history. The economic history. But somewhere nestled deep within that history of the storm there is a little footnote. A footnote dedicated to the tireless work of the Gulf Coast legal community.

Jed Cain is a trial lawyer and partner with Herman, Herman, & Katz, LLC in New Orleans, Louisiana. Jed writes about family, the law, and Louisiana current events at Cain’s River. He can be reached by email at jcain@hhklawfirm.com.

Topics

, ,