Weil, Gotshal & Manges, LLP
Newsletter Excerpt
Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of homes caused loss of employment and erosion of the infrastructure along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, resulting in a huge number of people in dire need of legal counsel. Weil Gotshal was instrumental in developing and implementing a new approach to crisis response for claimants seeking relief from FEMA denials. Working with the Mississippi Volunteer Lawyers Project, the Mississippi Center for Legal Services, the Mississippi Center for Justice, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Weil Gotshal initiated a hotline referral program to provide pro bono legal assistance to Mississippi residents pursuing appeals of adverse decisions by FEMA. With the help of Weil Gotshal, cases were referred quickly and efficiently. After Weil Gotshal laid the initial groundwork, the project now benefits from the volunteer efforts of hundreds of attorneys from firms nationwide.
In one of the cases, a team from our Washington, DC office assisted a woman and her five year-old son who lost virtually all of their possessions when the apartment they were living in was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina. FEMA provided the client with a trailer, but it continually became contaminated with mold, jeopardizing the health of our client and her son. Despite FEMA’s repeated attempts to remove the mold, the problem persisted. . . In addition, when the client’s personal property damage was assessed by a FEMA inspector, FEMA provided her with only $1, 544.64 in disaster assistance, completely disregarding the client’s estimate of her personal property losses at $11,000.
A Weil attorney spoke regularly with the client to make certain that she and her family were safe, to assess the mold problem in her trailer, and to obtain photographs of the damage to her apartment and personal items. We also contacted FEMA to make arrangements to permanently repair or completely replace her trailer and to reassess the amount of disaster assistance she was awarded. Soon after we became involved, the client received a new trailer, and she has not reported any new problems with mold. Moreover, FEMA recalculated the amount of disaster assistance to be provided to the client and awarded her an additional $10,415.29.