Q&A with Judy Perry Martinez

YourABA spoke with Judy Perry Martinez, a New-Orleans based member of the ABA House of Delegates and former Board of Governors member, about her experiences during Hurricane Katrina and the challenge facing the legal community in the wake of the storm.

Q: Tell us a little about your evacuation from New Orleans.
We have a usual family hurricane preparation drill that we go through, with all of the children helping. We board up as many windows and doors as we can with plywood. We move everything we can upstairs to the second story of our home. We have approximately 11-foot ceilings so we move up those things we care about in terms of property so that they will be sufficiently protected. We move up all of our photographs, our artwork, and portraits of the kids. You can’t move the piano, which you are sentimental about, or many pieces of furniture, but most of the smaller things are brought up. We have done this routine for the last several evacuations, never dreaming that our efforts would be less than sufficient to protect our belongings. With Hurricane Katrina, our family was very fortunate that our preparation efforts were sufficient for our home. But obviously, even those efforts would not have been enough to protect the property of many families in the City of New Orleans from the destruction of Katrina.

We never hesitate to evacuate because we have four children and a mother who lives with us. So we actually got my mom, who has some health issues, out of town even before we departed. We left at about 6:00 on Saturday evening and took our usual evacuation route, which was to the home of my wonderful brother and sister-in-law in Baton Rouge. The usual hour and 15 minute ride to Baton Rouge from New Orleans took us 3½ hours on Saturday. In the last hurricane, it took us about 7½ hours, and during that hurricane, we were actually stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic and a drunk driver came barreling down the middle of the interstate and hit our car, along with seven other cars. So, as far as the evacuation itself went, you could call this one somewhat calm compared to the last one our family experienced.

By Sunday evening, before Katrina hit on early Monday morning, my brother and his wife’s house was home to 20 members of our extended family, three Labradors, one bird and ultimately even more animals as they were found.

Q: How old are your kids?
16, 13, 12 and 11. They can definitely help with the hurricane preparation, and they do. They're veterans, especially these past few years. Evacuations have become a fact of life.

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Q: When did you return to New Orleans, and could you tell us a bit about what you have found. What kind of losses did you sustain?
We live right off of St. Charles Avenue in what’s called Uptown. The first time my husband returned was about two weeks after the hurricane. Not knowing how we would find our city and our home, we made a conscious decision that both of us would not go and leave the children, so he went back with friends.

Our home was remarkably intact. We had some minor damage, some wind damage to the house, and wind driven rain damage in one room upstairs. We had a fence down, a tree fell, some boards off, and we lost one car that we left behind. We had had about two feet of water in our driveway. It was my son’s car that was totaled. Relatively speaking, we did really well.

I grew up in St. Bernard’s Parish, and out of the 20 or so people at my brother's home, making up seven households, we were the only ones whose home did not have six or more feet of water.

My oldest brother, who is a lawyer, lost the home in which he lived. It was the home where I grew up. He lost his law office, which is right next to the parish courthouse, on the same street. He lost two other homes that he and his wife had purchased and renovated over the past three years, which they were leasing out. So they lost all four pieces of property, and everything in them.

But truly, we all feel very fortunate compared to what other families have gone through. We are all safe and together, and we lost no one in our family to the hurricane.

What did we find when we went back to New Orleans? The area was devastated. Upon going back and seeing even a small part of the City that was open, the only word that came to mind was surreal, followed by eerie and desolate, although now small pockets are striving to come back to life. There was no activity, but now each time we go back we see a little more. At this point, there is not a lot of police presence or National Guard presence. Even now, our neighborhood is not a neighborhood filled with people, cars, pets, and activity, although little by little some neighbors are moving back. We live by an all girls’ Catholic school and it is silent as opposed to full of life as it usually is. You don’t hear the noises yet that you’re so used to hearing as the background of your life.

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Q: Sort of like on and after 9/11 when all the planes were grounded, when it was eerily quiet?
I’ll tell you something that really struck me. We live in this beautiful old 1896 home that we bought and completely restored, and through our bedroom window we can hear the sound of the streetcars rolling by on St. Charles Avenue. When we first moved here, ten years ago, it was a sound that we had to get used to. And now we miss it. It’s the little things that you don’t think about until they are absent that you truly miss.

Q: What kind of disaster plans are in place? How do employers communicate with their employees?
During and following Katrina, the newspapers weren’t operating; the television networks weren’t operating out of New Orleans. Remember, for several days, even much of Baton Rouge did not have power. There is a radio station that originated out of a truly wonderful collaborative effort by several New Orleans radio broadcast stations that realized they couldn’t operate on their own immediately following Katrina–URB, United Radio Broadcasters. They’re on 24 hours a day, and all these previously competitive DJs–gospel, oldies, rock, news–are working side by side. Their service throughout both hurricanes went uninterrupted.

They have been the lifeline for everyone down here.  Parish, city and state officials used the station to communicate to all who desperately wanted news about their cities and their neighborhoods, and members of the public even called in when they were looking for a family member. So a lot of employers also have used this station to get the word out: first, to make sure that their employees are safe, then to get people back to work as soon as possible, so that businesses can get up and running again and people can get paychecks in their hands.

Many employers, such as mine, continued payroll for their employees for a period of time following the storm even when they were shut down, set up Disaster Relief Centers so that employees can more easily access available FEMA and Red Cross resources, established toll free phone numbers for employees to receive information on company provided resources, are providing bus transportation from surrounding cities so that people who want to return to work but have lost their homes can do so, and are even providing temporary housing to a number of workers where possible.

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Q: Where are you staying now ?
We bought a small condo in Baton Rouge. Fortunately, we could do that. All four kids sleep on bunk beds in one bedroom. I guess it’s a preparation for college life, for dorm life.

Baton Rouge has welcomed so many into its arms and has allowed us to grieve, heal and in some ways continue our “New Orleans” lives while trying to start anew there. You run into your hometown friends in the grocery store–the first thing you do is shed a few tears when you see someone in your life again for the first time “post-Katrina,” then you give them a hug. You exchange stories, exchange new phone numbers and addresses and promise to get together soon–like before the hurricane. All the while the people of Baton Rouge, and so many cities like it, have opened their homes, their highways and their hearts to those of us who originally came to spend a day or two in their city and have now made it our new home.

The kids have been remarkable. They have kept their chins up. They have been thrown into new schools. All of their extracurricular activities have been taken away. Their friends have been scattered, they're all over the country. My youngest little boy has a good friend now living in Minnesota, another in Florida. My other two young ones have a couple of displaced friends in their classes at their new schools; that’s very comforting to them.

Our children have friends who have lost their homes and all of their contents. Ten days after the hurricane, I was in a meeting of parents from my two oldest sons' high school and learned that their school still had chest-deep water. That's a school for 1,400 students.

Our kids’ grammar school is right off St. Charles Street adjacent to Tulane University and across from Audubon Park. It's a school built in the late 1800s and it was used by the military as a staging area during the early weeks of recovery. I saw photographs on the Web–the school parking lot was packed with Humvees. The buildings sustained little damage, but the teachers are scattered, many having lost their homes. Both of our schools are planning to start up in January. The public schools are in much worse shape. In New Orleans Parish proper, many schools will not open until the next school year, meaning the fall of 2006.

Before the hurricane, when we were living in some sense of normalcy, my husband or I always said grace at dinner. Shortly before Katrina, we decided to start asking the kids to take turns, and if no one volunteered to say grace, Mom or Dad would say it.

Last night, our son–our 13-year old–said grace. He prayed for all the folks, for all the people who lost members of their families. He prayed for the people in shelters. Our 10-year old added, “pray for the people in the earthquake.” Children are so aware of all that is happening in their little lives, and yet they choose in their prayers to focus on others–I am sure that is a prayer being said at lots of dinner tables across the country.

So, if our children are willing to make the best of this situation, there’s no excuse for us not to. It's the kids that allow you to move on–more importantly, to renew life. It’s inspiring to my husband and me how they have dealt with the storm and its aftermath, and I hear that sentiment from so many other parents as well.

Q: How hard hit was the legal system? What kind of problems does it face in rebuilding?
There are law firms, big and small, that have been devastated while others have fared well.

Lawyers are doing what they can, some operating out of several different cities because their offices have been destroyed. Some firms have been fortunate not to miss a beat while others have partners not getting paid some or all of what they are accustomed to, because they want their staff to be paid through the rough times and continue health benefits. Some firms cut back temporarily on some percentage of pay to staff and then anytime money comes in the door the first thing they do is make up the percentage that the staff has missed. Some solo practitioners and small firms have been hard hit and you must remember that because most of the courts are not operating the pace of litigation-related work has slowed to a crawl and thus receivables and fees at some plaintiff as well as defense firms will be impacted for months to come.

There’s a lot of sacrificing going on. I’ve heard anecdotally over and over again that the biggest thing that lawyers are striving for is to see that there’s minimal disruption in client services. They are doing all they can to make sure that clients know how to reach them and that they can reconnect with clients to render services. Many in heavily hit areas have lost files and are struggling to reestablish vital records of clients when the state agencies that provide them suffered significant damage and are unable to respond.

Lawyers I know have been going in to their offices, despite the challenges that they face at home with rebuilding. They may not even have met yet with their homeowner or flood insurance adjuster concerning their own house, yet they’re still spending hours in their offices reconnecting with clients and getting their practices up and running again.

And of course, the courts in the City of New Orleans as well as across the Gulf Coast that suffered impact from the storm are struggling to re-start operations. Again, many of the members of the bench, federal and state, along with their law clerks, clerks of court, public defenders, prosecutors, investigators, marshals and parole officers have lost their own homes, yet they have worked hard each day since August 29 to get the court system up and running again. When that will happen varies from courthouse to courthouse–some have already reestablished minimal dockets, but the efforts of all those involved need to be recognized, and most importantly, supported.

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Q: Can you comment on the long-term loss to the profession–and to clients–that may result from the incredible losses members of the profession sustained? More generally, what might that loss mean in terms of the public?
I don’t see an overall long-term loss to the profession if we act now, but what I do anticipate is the individual losses that will be borne for many, many years by those who have put decades of heart and soul into building their practices. If the members of the profession in Louisiana who were spared and other able members of our profession across the country do not step up and help those individual lawyers who have suffered the devastation of Katrina and Rita, then we may lose talented and dedicated professionals who have made our Louisiana Bar and our practice what it is today. What I see is there's a real desire for many firms to stay together–a real desire for many solo practitioners to go back to being the town or neighborhood lawyer. And it’s difficult when families scatter to different cities and when children are in different schools, so the circumstances of lawyer displacement are impacting some firms' ability to stay together and the sole practitioner's ability to reopen. You may end up seeing smaller satellite offices survive for some time because of displacement.

As to how legal services available to the disadvantaged have been impacted, in that regard the impact has been great. The Southeast Legal Services Office, which had its main office in New Orleans, continues to operate out of its Hammond office, but some of its staff are in Shreveport and elsewhere. Other legal services offices in Mississippi and Louisiana were seriously impacted also. Their clients as well as those of non-profit legal service organizations are struggling to find answers to questions regarding child custody, housing, domestic violence and benefits. Many of their clients have been displaced and relocated to shelters or outside of cities with public transportation and thus just traveling to a legal services provider can be difficult. Dedicated lawyers with those offices have been working long hours to reconnect with their clients and meet those legal needs.

The Louisiana State Bar has exhibited extraordinary effort in its response to the disaster. LSBA President Frank Neuner and the bar staff have been extraordinary in running the state bar out of its new temporary home in Lafayette. Frank, along with his fellow bar leaders, has established a fund to assist lawyers whose practices were destroyed by Katrina and Rita and is working hard to assist displaced lawyers and their clients to re-connect. I’m sure the Bars of Mississippi and Alabama are doing similar great things to lead the way to recovery.

The ABA has been instrumental in offering assistance in the development of an effective plan to reach both impacted lawyers and clients. The Section of Litigation is working on a plan to assist in funding legal services in the disaster area. As the months progress, there’s going to be heard a rallying cry from state and local bars in our area for help, and I have no doubt that our colleagues in the bar and on the bench across the country will respond generously with their time, talent and resources.

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