| Hurricane Ike: Snapshots After the Storm
September 15, 2008
While Hurricane Ike has made the practice of law in Galveston impossible, that’s not so in Houston, where lawyers are coming back to work after a weekend of cleaning up downed trees and dealing with a lack of electricity.
“Some folks wanted to come in, and we have air and power,” says Marie Yeates, the administrative partner for the Houston office of Vinson & Elkins, who came in to work today to assess the damage. “And we don’t have air and power at home. So some people would rather be here. But we’ve told people to watch out and choose their roads carefully. But I think we’re going to be fine.”
Although V&E — one of the largest firms in Houston — closed its home office located in the First City Tower at 1001 Fannin St. today, the building suffered very little damage, allowing some lawyers to come in to work, Yeates says.
“We had just a couple of offices where the windows came out. It was very minor damage inside the office,” Yeates says. “And we’ve got a lot of offices were the windows have been cracked. We have been very fortunate.”
Lawyers in her office today are busy closing deals, while others are working on their laptops from home. Some lawyers are helping their clients locate undamaged office space to get their businesses restarted. Life in Houston’s central business district is slowly returning to normal — as normal as possible after a hurricane, Yeates says. “I’m looking out the window, and there are a number of cars.”
Self Starter
Houston criminal defense lawyer Mark Bennett says his practice is up and running — no thanks to the electric company.
“Yesterday I waited in line two hours to buy a little generator, so we have power to run the refrigerator, charge laptops and so forth,” says Bennett, a partner in Bennett & Bennett. With no air conditioning and only one phone line working, he says the firm is “just getting back to business.” Luckily, Bennett says, he and his partner, Jennifer Bennett, didn’t have any appearances scheduled before Wednesday, “so the court closures aren’t directly affecting our clients.”
On the Road
Tom Kirkendall, a solo complex business litigator, is still taking calls, working on cases and filing documents electronically. He’s just doing it from the front seat of his Infinity Q45. It’s all part of the tech-intensive disaster plan that Kirkendall put into place as the forecast grew grimmer.
“I’ve lived in Houston going on 37 years, so I’ve been through my share of hurricanes,” says Kirkendall, who also runs the popular blog, Houston's Clear Thinkers. “The biggest thing is that you have to be able to function without power.”
To prepare to practice to go unplugged, Kirkendall downloaded his active case files to his laptop. Just storing files on the Web isn’t enough, he points out, because access depends on a server that needs electricity to run. He then changed the outgoing message on his office line to include his cell phone. Once power was knocked out, Kirkendall, who lives and works in The Woodlands, says he started relying on his cell phone, his car battery to power his laptop and an air card to access the Internet, which gives him a cell-hookup to connect his laptop the World Wide Web. It’s slow — about the speed of a cable modem — but it works well enough, he says.
“If I need to work on a pleading, I can go back to my office and work on it, then go back to my car, find an area where I have cell coverage, and file it wherever I need to file it,” he says.
Regardless, Kirkendall knows he's in better shape than most, and he suspects the courts will waiving their e-filing requirements over the next few weeks.
“Even with the best disaster preparation, you can’t think of everything,” he says. “The people down in the Chase Tower in Houston, many of those firms had very good disaster preparation, but when windows start blowing out and furniture and files are careening down the streets of downtown, it’s difficult.”
No Hearings
If you’ve got a hearing in federal court in Houston or Galveston any time this week, it’s been canceled courtesy of Hurricane Ike, says Hayden Head, chief judge of the Southern District of Texas.
“We will not have any scheduled hearings the rest for the week,” Head says. “That’s just for the sake of the attorneys and the litigants.”
Houston’s federal courthouse weathered the storm well, but the condition of Galveston’s courthouse is unknown, Head says.
The highways in and out of Galveston have been closed to regular traffic since the hurricane hit the island over the weekend. A team from the U.S. General Services Administration, the federal agency the runs and manages most of the nations’ federal buildings, is inspecting the Galveston federal courthouse today, but Head has not heard about the condition of the courthouse.
“That building is closed indefinitely until we get an assessment,” Head says.
But he is hoping that the courtrooms, which are located on the top floors of the building on the island, are O.K.
“It’s a very sturdy building,” he says.
School’s Out
Meanwhile, the three American Bar Association-accredited law schools in Houston are closed today, according to notices posted to their web sites. South Texas College of Law and Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law are closed at least through Tuesday, Sept. 16. The University of Houston Law Center also is closed today, but the notice on the school’s Web site indicates the school might open on Tuesday. Students, faculty and staff should check the school's Web site or listen to local TV and radio announcements in the morning to verify whether to pack up their books and head for the classrooms.
Show and Share
As post-storm cleanup begins, lawyers need office space, Internet access, telephones and electricity. If you can help out your fellow attorneys with any of these things, or if you're an attorney in need, e-mail your specs and contact information to Texas Lawyer managing editor Anne McMillan at anne.mcmillan@incisivemedia.com. Texas Lawyer will post your submissions on its blog.
Also, please send us your law-related stories and photos of Ike, so we can share them with the legal community on our Web site.
