Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-1) and Mary Gay Scanlon (PA-5) co-hosted an event on disaster legal aid on September 11 at the U.S. House of Representatives. In their capacity as co-chairs of the House Access to Civil Legal Aid Caucus, Reps. Fitzpatrick and Scanlon held the event, “Rebuilding Lives: Legal Aid’s Role in Disaster Recovery,” in conjunction with the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), the nation’s largest funder of civil legal assistance.

Attendees heard how federal funding supports legal assistance for Americans who have survived natural disasters and encounter legal problems in the recovery process, but who are unable to afford an attorney.

Executive directors from three LSC-funded legal services organizations in Louisiana, North Carolina and Texas spoke on a panel moderated by LSC Board Vice Chair Father Pius Pietrzyk.

“The Legal Services Corporation, being a national entity, has been able to convene a lot of players in disaster recovery — to bring them together with the legal services folks to allow [these communities] to know each other and to work together to help the survivors of disasters,” said Pietrzyk.

Since 2013, Congress has enacted Disaster Supplemental Appropriations that included funding for LSC to fund recovery efforts after significant natural disasters. For the past ten years, LSC has distributed disaster funds as grants to nonprofit legal services organizations serving low-income Americans in disaster-stricken regions. LSC was not included in the most recent Disaster Supplemental, which was attached to the Fiscal Year 2025 Continuing Resolution in December 2025 for disasters that occurred in 2023 and 2024.

Ashley Campbell, executive director of Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC); Laura Tuggle, executive director of Southeast Louisiana Legal Services (SLLS); and Robert Doggett, executive director of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (TRLA) participated in the panel.

Doggett discussed TRLA’s recent work responding to the July 2025 flooding in central Texas. TRLA has prior disaster response experience from Hurricane Harvey and Winter Storm Uri, and the organization is applying these lessons to its response to the devastation brought on by the floods.

“We have a disaster team, and that’s all they do full-time because, frankly, there is always something happening or about to happen, and cases that they still have to resolve,” said Doggett. “We have to be ready when things happen.”

There are many legal issues after disasters that people do not expect and are not aware that they will need an attorney’s help to address, Doggett explained. These include replacing legal documents like the title to their house, or addressing child custody matters when one parent moves because their home was destroyed. But, he said, it doesn’t happen all at once.

“Some of the [legal] issues start to develop months later — sometimes years later — and it takes a long time to figure them all out,” Doggett said. “We still have cases that have been around for several years after a disaster.”

Since Tropical Storm Helene hit North Carolina almost a year ago, LANC has helped many families in complex legal situations after their homes were destroyed, Campbell said. She told the story of one client who lost both his wife and his home during the storm. He was struggling to access his wife’s life insurance benefits, which he needed to care for their son. LANC helped him secure those funds and also assisted with his FEMA application and home insurance claim. The client wanted to move away from the site of his tragic loss, Campell explained, but he also needed to avoid a foreclosure on his home, which would ruin his credit.

“For him, turning the property over to the mortgage lender was a good result, [and] we were able to get the lender to take that insurance money, take the land back, satisfy the loan, and he was able to move on,” Campbell said. “Then finally, we were able to do a new will for him so that he and his son would have security.”

Campbell said that a common legal issue after disaster is heirs' property — when a family member has inherited a home, but there is not proper legal documentation of their ownership.

“Then a disaster strikes and they realize, ‘Oh my goodness, I actually own this property with my six cousins,’” said Campbell. “So, we have to help homeowners resolve those problems, and they’re really complex legal problems that only a lawyer can resolve.”

Louisiana commemorated the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2025. Since then, the state has experienced several other significant storms, including Hurricane Ida in 2021, which was the seventh most damaging hurricane in U.S. history.

Tuggle said that SLLS has handled 6,372 cases from Ida thus far. SLLS has tracked the economic benefit of their work — from things like the FEMA assistance and insurance payouts that they have helped people in southeast Louisiana access — and it has exceeded $47 million.

“The human impact – it's very difficult to measure that,” Tuggle said. “So, we are definitely tracking [the economic benefits of] that work and being able to make a huge difference in the lives of the people we serve.”

Tuggle explained that after disasters, SLLS spends a lot of time helping seniors with heirs’ property issues, insurance, accessing recovery assistance, bankruptcy, scams and fraud. Often, she explains, people are experiencing several of these problems at once.

To close the event, LSC shared a video, telling the stories of three disaster survivors who turned to LSC-funded legal services for help.

More information about disaster legal services can be found at LSC.gov/disaster.