Letter from the President Salvo
Hurricane Katrina

Letter from the President Salvo

Dear Colleagues:

We know everyone in The Iowa State Bar Association family wants to do all we can to help those members who have been devastated by Katrina. I have asked Executive Director Dwight Dinkla to assist putting individuals who can help in contact with people who need the help. The ISBA office will assist in coordinating the needs of distressed colleagues and members of the legal community in the Gulf area with the resources you might offer to meet those needs. We ask that each of our members help in this effort by doing the following (PLEASE SEE THE RESPONSE FORM FOLLOWING THIS MESSAGE):

1. If you can offer housing or transportation to a colleague or student displaced by Katrina, please contact Dwight Dinkla via email (ddinkla@iabar.org) and provide the details of what you can offer.

2. If you can offer temporary office space or office supplies (from a legal pad to a lap top, and everything in between) to an attorney displaced by Katrina, again, contact Dwight Dinkla (ddinkla@iabar.org).

3. Most importantly -- If you are in contact with any attorney displaced by Katrina, and that attorney needs assistance with housing and/or establishing a temporary office, please ask that attorney, either through you or directly, to contact Dwight (ddinkla@iabar.org). If you have working contact information for these people, please supply that information to Dwight so that we can most effectively reach those who need help and enable other members to contact them. Our offers of assistance will do no good if we can not find a way to contact our displaced attorney in Louisiana, Mississippi or Alabama.

By offering our assistance, we can make available the full resources of the ISBA membership to those in our family who have lost so much and who face such great challenges.

Thank you for your efforts.

Sincerely,
JC Salvo
President

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Hurricane Katrina

This message is being posted on behalf of Loretta Larsen, executive director of the Louisiana State Bar Association, and Ann Scarle, executive director of the Baton Rouge Bar Association:

Due to the widespread destruction that Hurricane Katrina has had on the Metropolitan New Orleans area, the Louisiana State Bar Association has established the Hurricane Katrina Legal Community Relief Fund to help assist lawyers who lost their homes and offices in the storm.

"The Red Cross and FEMA are poised to help citizens cope with their personal losses but I am confident members of the legal community will come together to help their colleagues whose law practices and families have been displaced by this unprecedented disaster," LSBA President Frank X. Neuner, Jr. of Lafayette said of the fund. "Lawyers from across the state and country have contacted me in the past few days to determine what they can do to assist other members of the profession," Neuner added. "We created the fund to provide a mechanism for these caring members of the legal community
to assist their colleagues in this time of need."

The Relief Fund is being administered by the Baton Rouge Bar Foundation.
Donations should be sent to:
Hurricane Katrina Legal Community Relief Fund
c/o Baton Rouge Bar Foundation
544 Main Street
Baton Rouge, LA 70802


Questions on the fund should be directed to Baton Rouge Bar Association Executive Director Ann G. Scarle at (225)344-4803 or ann@brba.org.

Other LSBA storm related efforts include facilitating the sponsorship of free seminars for lawyers to learn how to work with FEMA to assist those impacted by the storm. Seminars are scheduled as follows: Thursday, September 8, at 1:30 p.m. in conjunction with the Baton Rouge Bar Association Law Expo and on Friday, September 9 in Lafayette, LA.

Information on the fund, seminars and other LSBA initiatives will be posted on the Association's web site at www.LSBA.org. Lawyers with Internet access are encouraged to check the site for this information, as well as announcements and postings by the Louisiana Supreme Court.

The LSBA is in the process of establishing a temporary office in Lafayette. The Louisiana Bar Center, located in downtown New Orleans, will be closed indefinitely. Contact information will be posted at LSBA.org as soon as it is available.