by Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
While Florida is currently known as “the Sunshine State,” it may soon be remembered as “the State of Generous Attorneys.”
In less than a week after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, members of both the Jacksonville Bar Association and the Florida Bar have opened up their wallets to help with recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast.
As of Thursday, members of the Jacksonville Bar had donated more than $29,000 to the American Red Cross, said JBA President Alan Pickert.
“This is fantastic,” Pickert said. “Keep in mind that this is $29,000-plus. We are still getting checks in and this is in addition to what people have already given. They have already given once so to raise $29,000-plus is phenomenal.”
The Florida Bar also has stepped up to the call of duty regarding hurricane relief. Florida Bar President Alan Bookman said members from all over the state are presenting overwhelming support for Katrina’s victims.
“The response has been absolutely unbelievable from the legal profession,” Bookman said. “I haven’t found a single lawyer who hasn’t opened up their wallet or who hasn’t volunteered their home, offered office space or offered administrative assistance.”
Though there are no cumulative figures regarding what members of the Florida Bar have donated so far monetarily, Bookman said there are several examples of major donations from the legal community. In Pensacola, he said two firms have collectively gathered and donated more than $175,000 for recovery efforts.
“That is a great amount and there is more coming,” he said. “We are not asking people to contribute to a single source. We are asking people to contribute to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army or their churches or whatever.”
Besides generous monetary donations, Bookman said the Florida Bar has also answered a request from Gov. Jeb Bush’s office to help find Florida property owners willing to provide locations for temporary shelters for evacuees. In a recent letter to every member of the Florida Bar, Bookman asked members to talk with their clients and friends who own property in Florida to seek their help with the effort.
So far, he said the response has been amazing.
“I have gotten calls and e-mails from as far away as Key West saying ‘What can I do to help? We have got space down here, we have space over there, we have openings available.’ So when the governor’s office called us back and said that the space has been unbelievable, I feel pretty good about that,” he said.
Included in the thousands of people affected by the flooding are hundreds of lawyers and Bookman said the Florida Bar is also working to help them get back on their feet. Though all lawyers in the devastated area have been affected, he expects that solo practitioners will take the hardest hit.
“A lot of these solo practitioners are going to get hurt the worst,” he said. “They are out of business. All of their records, all of their files, all of their servers are wet and destroyed. These people, and not just the lawyers, have lost everything.”
Bookman said moves are currently being discussed in the Florida Supreme Court to relax some of the rules that ban out-of-state attorneys from practicing Louisiana or Mississippi law in the state of Florida. He also said that Congress is discussing changing the effective date of the new bankruptcy code “because that is really going to impact these folks in New Orleans.”
If Bookman seems passionate about helping Katrina’s victims, he has plenty of personal ties to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to validate his compassion. Besides being from New Orleans, having family there and being a graduate of Tulane University, Bookman currently lives in Pensacola where people are still trying to get over last year’s devastation from Hurricane Ivan.
“In Pensacola, we unfortunately personally experienced this last year with Ivan,” he said. “We still have two good firms that are displaced and still don’t have their offices back. We still have judges in FEMA trailers because our courthouse was badly damaged.“
Though Bookman said he is fortunate and thankful that his family and friends were able to get out of New Orleans before it was too late, he is sorry there were so many on the Gulf Coast that couldn’t leave. That’s why generosity is so important right now, he said.
“My family and my friends have the ability to get out,” he said. “They were fortunate to be able to get out. They could fly, they could drive, they had places they could go. But there are thousands and thousands of underprivileged who, even though there was a mandatory evacuation, had no place to go and they had no way to get there. They didn’t even have money for a bus ticket.
“Those are the people we have to help.”