CHARLESTON — With the devastation caused to West Virginia during the recent flooding, the legal community in the state is reaching out.
The West Virginia State Bar and its members are making an by helping the people and communities affected by the floods. “Lawyers are also family members, neighbors and citizens,” John McGhee, president of The West Virginia State Bar, told the West Virginia Record. “They are acting in all those roles like you would expect them to, helping the families and helping neighbors and just trying to help their communities because their hearts are going to the people and they're helping as they can. There’s a lot of stories of individual lawyers acting independently or through their churches and ultimately through their law offices to do everything you see other people doing.”
In addition to the ways its members are reaching out independently to the communities affected, The West Virginia State Bar has set up a hotline at 877-331-4259 where people faced with flood devastation can go for legal advice.
“Through Legal Aid of West Virginia, a hotline has been established to help answer flood relief legal questions,” said McGhee. "There are any number of questions that are likely to come up. We’re trying to anticipate those as best we can. Ideas are coming in every day. Things like: What happens if my house has been damaged? How do I make an insurance claim? What can FEMA do for me? If my house has been destroyed or damaged and the bank wants my mortgage payment, how do I deal with that?
“Same type of issues with landlord/tenant. What responsibilities does my landlord have? What responsibilities do I have? Then, you get into family law. What if I was supposed to have visitation with my kids this weekend, but I don’t have a place because of the flooding for my visitation? How do I handle that? What happens with special education plans? If the school doesn’t open, what’s going to go on? Just every facet of the law.”
The move to set up a hotline was spurred by a response from the South Carolina Bar, which reached out to the West Virginia State Bar to offer help and resources that worked for the South Carolina group after that state's flooding in October 2015. The South Carolina Bar reached out, “saying, 'hey, we’ve been down this road and what can we do to help?'” said McGhee. “'Here’s some resources that were pointed out to us and you may be able to use them.'”
The West Virginia State Bar then teamed up with the American Bar Association to form the hotline and offer legal resources on two websites, www.wvbar.org and www.lawv.net. Offering legal help through The West Virginia State Bar was a way for the legal community to offer what it does best, McGhee said. “The bar is trying to see what can lawyers do, independent of what lots of folks are doing, that’s uniquely situated to what lawyers do, and that is through legal aid.”