What Makes an Emergency Legal Responder?
Emergency legal responders are licensed attorneys who provide legal assistance to individuals who need help in the midst of an emergency. Their services often come at times when an individual is most likely vulnerable, such as in the aftermath of a car accident, natural disaster or other emergency. Emergency legal responders include personal injury lawyers, criminal defense attorneys, family law attorneys , real estate lawyers and more.
Emergency legal responders often assist with the following matters:
One of the key distinctions of the services offered by emergency legal responders and the lawyers who may assist individuals through conventional means is accessibility. Emergency legal responders offer their services when they are needed most and, largely, when attorneys at conventional law firms are not accessible. Emergency legal responders will commonly refer individuals to other firms when necessary, but they act quickly to secure representation before matters can get out of control.
Emergency Legal Responders and Why They Matter
During a time of crisis, when you find yourself needing immediate legal counsel, having the guidance of an emergency legal responder can make all the difference. Having a legal expert on-call to quickly respond to an urgent matter protects you and your business from unnecessary risk and time spent managing a crisis.
An emergency legal responder is an attorney who rapidly evaluates the situation and provides a strategy for the most effective response to the issue. Whether it is a threat to your business that requires property protection or the imminent danger of a lawsuit, the right legal approach is critical to obtaining a favorable outcome.
Not only can a legal emergency be unsettling, but they can also be dangerous to your business. Without the legal advice of someone who understands the law, your business may suffer physical or financial loss that could have been avoided.
Emergency legal responders provide valuable insight to help you identify the threats facing your business and establish a strategy to neutralize the danger as fast as possible. Their legal expertise allows them to make critical decisions even under the most complicated situations. Emergency legal responders have dedicated their careers to anticipating risks and developing the best responses to neutralize them. This level of insight is essential to minimizing personal and/or business loss.
In addition to protecting your clients, staff, assets and office space, having an emergency legal responder can ensure that a crisis does not impact your reputation in the community. When there is a problem with the public facing a legal concern, it is important to be able to publicly address the situation. Having a legal expert on call to guide the PR strategy has the potential to change the outcome of the situation.
When a legal issue becomes urgent, you want a legal professional who is well-versed in the area of law related to your situation. Additionally, timely responses are critical to avoiding unnecessary risk and loss.
When Do You Need Emergency Legal Responders?
Many different types of scenarios can require the expertise of an emergency legal responder. A number of them involve time-sensitive situations when a speedy response is necessary to prevent a negative outcome. This can include anything from an unlawful eviction to a sudden arrest, and from the installation of unpopular ordinances to the motion for a new trial. Important deadlines are a major factor requiring emergency legal response, so any paperwork that is due in less than a few days often falls in this category. The installation of a temporary injunction is one of the most common situations where emergency legal response is called for. This particular type of court order prohibits a person or group of people from participating in a specific action. For example, a party may seek a temporary injunction to prevent the defendant from contacting the plaintiff. Any action for which immediate intervention is required may warrant the involvement of an emergency legal responder.
How to Locate Emergency Legal Responders
Emergency legal responders can be found in a few different ways. Many responders are members of "Catastrophic Response" teams as part of their membership in national trial lawyer groups, bar associations and other organizations. Catastrophic response groups are groups of experienced litigators that agree to provide support to each other in light of the catastrophe’s demands. For example, the Consumer Attorneys of California has its Disaster Relief Group, which includes many of the top litigators in the state and maintains an email list where members can share contact information from anywhere in the state. If you already belong to a national trial lawyer group, you can post a message to the listserv of that organization (i.e. AAJ, or ABA’s TIPS).
Testimonial referrals can provide help locating emergency responders focused in particular practice fields, including toxic tort litigation. The top names in certain practice areas often provide a referral list. For toxic tort cases in California, the best contact for referral is Charles Siegel ([email protected]).
In some cases, the State Bar of California maintains a list of attorneys who have indicated an interest in providing pro bono services. For example, the State Bar of California’s "Pro Bono Referral Service" is an online database of lawyers interested in volunteering for cases involving legal issues such as child custody, battered women’s issues, housing issues, and employment discrimination.
Other websites may also help facilitate an emergency legal response such as www.calattorneys.com.
What to Look for in an Emergency Legal Responder
This role is crucial and requires a specialized skill set and enabling qualities. Since the loss is often life-changing and even life-threatening, the stakes are high. In fact, fatality disaster management has the highest level of individual stress response (second only to direct personal experience with a natural disaster or tsunami). Quick decision-making is a top necessity, in that these responders have to be able to walk into a home, business, or other loss scene, quickly ascertain the situation, and triage between a handful of other companies or potential clients and the six companies they are representing .
Above and beyond the natural abilities of emotional intelligence, empathy, compassion, and sensitivity, the legal emergency responder has to be able to speak to the victim in order to obtain legal consent for services. But they can’t be cold or aloof, as some lawyers can be; they must also be able to diffuse volatile situations among family members, clients, contractors/emergency responders, or to be able to elevate a nervous person’s level of concern sufficiently to allow for hiring of a company (which is not about them—yet).
How to Prepare for Emergencies that Require Legal Aid
To prepare for potential legal emergencies, individuals and businesses should have certain basic documents readily available. Indeed, having quick access to these documents can make the difference between calm resolution of a minor issue or the potential disruption of your personal or business operations. While an emergency may be defined differently for each person and company, individuals and businesses should have a plan to ensure that they will be able to quickly receive legal assistance when needed.
As I explained in my last post, the availability of emergency legal responders allows you to plan out confidential strategies to address legal challenges before they arise. When choosing which information and documents to keep on hand, it is important to remember that there are some categories of documents that are more likely to be needed in an emergency than others. These include, among other things, contacts for your usual legal counsel and for corporate officers and senior management, your insurance agent and any insurance policies that include potential coverage for the circumstance, as well as your company’s financial statements, reports to and from regulatory agencies and any minutes relating to corporate decision making regarding significant events.
Preparing a "go bag" with paper copies of these documents is important, but not as important as creating electronic versions of the same documents that are maintained on a computer or media that is easily accessible during an emergency. Ideally, these documents should be updated more or less in real time so that you will have the most up to date versions of the information available.
Every plan to address what to do in a crisis will only be effective to the extent that the plan is practiced and is familiar to all of the key decision makers involved. Periodically, all personnel with any involvement in the management of significant corporate events or dealing with emergency situations should review relevant portions of the plan and practice using the plan with the aid of drill simulations to ensure that all personnel know how to execute their functions in the event of an emergency.
Case Analyses of the Emergency Legal Responder
Take the case of a mobile phone manufacturing company in Austin, Texas. When the Texas tornado warning sirens started blaring last summer and Austin Police Department began moving the residents of a nearby neighborhood into the community shelter, the Chief Legal Counsel for the Hail Mary製 company contacted COOP Legal’s emergency legal team to visit the shelter to help the relocated residents secure temporary guardianship of their children so they could pick them up at the school that was acting as the community shelter. The Chief Legal Counsel of Hail Mary (named for the Mary invented by StemCellz, Inc., who later was sued by the Giant Prototype company) realized his fellow faculties and staff at the school would need some help with all of the stress caused by the scrambling parents rushing to the school who were relieved to find that their children had made it to safety but now needed to get temporary guardianship since they (of course) didn’t bring their guardianship papers with them to work that day. Another example of the need for legal help when disaster strikes that we have encountered was when the Lakeway Chipmunks (a federal credit union in Lakeway , Texas) had an evacuation order issued because of aggressive wildfires encroaching on their Lakeway, Texas headquarters. The chief compliance officer at Lakeway Chipmunks also understood their other locations (Lake Travis and 620A), which were only about 10 miles away and relatively unaffected by the fires. So, in the need for haste, he called COOP Legal to find out how quickly a legal services team could be sent to the other facilities to assist their staff with awareness of the company’s legal standing, clients’ status, and customer notifications in the event that the Lakeway headquarters did not survive (or the organization itself be forced to relocate outside of the affected area).