Houstonians breathed a sigh of relief as they woke up this morning. Almost three years after Hurricane Harvey flooded the city, it was spared this time around from Hurricane Laura, so far the main event of the 2020 hurricane season.
Overnight, the category 4 storm pounded the shores of southwest Louisiana and far-east Texas, leaving devastating damage and a new crisis for the impacted communities to face on top of COVID-19.
But in downtown Houston, law firms were graced Thursday with sunshine and a clear view of the skyline from the windows of their predominantly unoccupied offices.
Because they were already squared away for virtual work due to the COVID-19 pandemic and lessons learned from Hurricane Harvey, law firms are able to focus their energy on legal help their clients from Laura’s most affected areas will be in need of.
The hardest-hit economy in the storm’s path was the Lake Charles area, which is problematic for the energy industry. The area is home to hundreds of businesses that operate major petrochemical plants, refineries and other plants. A severe fire has already erupted at the BioLab chemical manufacturing facility due to a chlorine leak caused by the hurricane.
To make the best of a bad situation, the companies affected at least know they can lean on their outside lawyers — many of whom are based in Houston and have been fully-equipped for months to handle their client’s needs out of their homes.
“This is a year of plague,” said Hector Chavez, a partner at Houston litigation boutique Smyser Kaplan & Veselka. “Outside my window I don’t see a cloud of locusts yet, but funnily enough because of the pandemic, I’d say there was a lot more preparedness across the legal community.”
Chavez said that the pandemic has made lawyers more mentally, technologically and practically resilient when disasters hit.
“I think storms like this are a good indicator of the way the legal practice has changed and will hopefully have gleaned some of those silver linings from the whole COVID pandemic experience,” he said.
SKV was in a unique position for virtual preparedness because the firm moved to a new office last year — what feels like a lifetime ago since the pandemic hit the U.S. this spring. During the move, the firm implemented a robust facelift on its IT system, including upgrading the system’s remote work capabilities.
“With COVID happening in 2020, we didn’t have a single hour of downtime,” said Mohamed Rehman, the firm’s IT director. “People were just working as usual.”
The firm also placed an emphasis on upgrading its employees’ access to data in a disaster environment.
“Those have been the two things that we focused on beginning 18 months ago and thankfully that put us in line to be well-prepared,” SKV partner Ty Doyle said.
While others echoed that the current work-from-home environment equipped them with virtual systems already in place and removed the headache of employees having to rush home from the office to prepare for a storm, they also acknowledged that they don’t have a full picture because Houston was so unaffected.
“Overall, it is hard for me to say whether a hurricane is more or less disruptive to law firms because of COVID-19,” said Reagan Simpson, a partner at Yetter Coleman. “I would say that the disruption is just different. Given that Houston was really unaffected by this storm, I cannot give a full comparison of the difficulties, and I am hoping not to be able to do so during the remainder of the current hurricane season.”
At Bracewell, insurance partner Vince Morgan was already fielding calls Thursday from energy and petrochemical clients severely impacted by Hurricane Laura as they evaluate their damage and prepare to submit claims to their insurance companies.
Because these kinds of businesses are likely to have purchased so many different coverage areas in their commercial insurance, Morgan said there are several kinds of storm-related legal issues that can crop up between companies and their insurance carriers as they evaluate their claims, coverage and policies.
He said the main sub-issues that often arise within the umbrella of insurance litigation include: 1) valuation issues with respect to replacement costs for damaged equipment, 2) business interruption and ingress/egress claims (for companies that physically cannot access their facilities), 3) civil authority coverage, and 4) service interruption claims.
And that’s just insurance. It doesn’t account for any personal injury claims, commercial disputes, or regulatory disputes that could surface as a result of Laura.
“These are complicated issues. There are a lot of moving parts and you have to have the expertise and resources to fit them all together,” Morgan said. “Businesses are going to need real help as they recover from what was a really devastating storm.”
Some corporate general counsel planned for the worst and were relieved when their fears were not realized.
Kevin McDonald, the general counsel and chief administrative officer of NexTier Oilfield Services, said the company closed its offices Wednesday, but was back open today without many problems. The Houston-based company has operations in South Texas, Central Louisiana and a dozen locations throughout the U.S.
“Because of all that we’ve been through with COVID, we have been ready for any business continuity issues, which fortunately we did not experience,” he said.
Mark Curriden contributed to this report.