FRONT-LINE HEROES
Lawyer responds to COVID crisis with community information guide
Lawyer helps in COVID crisis with community information guide.
Keri Brown says Houston lawyers found themselves in a unique position to respond to the global health pandemic, due in part to their experience with the crisis that followed Hurricane Harvey.
In 2017 her law firm, Baker Botts, released a guide to help the public navigate post-flood issues ranging from income loss and eviction to lost birth certificates and immigration documents.
As the Partner-in-Charge of Baker Botts’ Corporate Social Responsibility, Brown anticipated the need for a similar resource as the spread of coronavirus first threatened the U.S.
When businesses shut down and travel bans were announced, “it became clear that this was going to be, for lack of a better word, a disaster,” she says.
Brown took action. Putting out the call for help, she enlisted the efforts of about 60 lawyers in various fields across Baker Botts’ U.S. offices to create a COVID-19 Community Resource Guide.
Tackling issues including student loans, mental health, utilities, Medicaid, taxes, price gouging and shelter-inplace orders, Brown’s team of volunteers spent a combined 600 pro bono hours publishing five different guides.
Covering the states where Baker Botts runs domestic offices, there are separate guides for Texas, California and New York, and another for Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia. The fifth guide encompasses federal issues.
Brown says the federal guide quickly became the most important because individuals and businesses needed to navigate the Paycheck Protection Plan, or PPP, and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, known as the CARES Act.
The guides, made available to the public via Baker Botts’ website, are formatted in a Q&A format — “as much as a lawyer could write a plain English guide,” she adds, laughing.
The Texas resource guide is also made available through the website of the Houston Bar Association, which operates LegalLine. LegalLine is a free community resource that connects volunteer lawyers with members of the public who call in to ask anonymous legal questions.
For a copy of Baker Botts’ COVID-19 Community Resource Guide, visit bakerbotts.com/insights/ publications/2020/april/covid-19-resource-guide-forindividuals.
When calls to LegalLine spiked in response to the coronavirus, HBA doubled its number of volunteers, who used the COVID-19 Community Resource Guide to help answer inquiries.
Mitch Reid, co-chair of the LegalLine committee, says the guide is “an invaluable resource” for phone volunteers.
“The pandemic obviously provided an unprecedented impact to both the city and the state and put a lot of people who aren’t normally reaching out to LegalLine calling with questions that were very specific to the crisis,” he says.
As the pandemic reached Houston, Reid says, volunteers found themselves needing to explain brand-new provisions. For example, an attorney volunteer who works in corporate mergers and acquisitions faced questions about landlord-tenant laws.
Other common questions from Houstonians, he says, relate to operating businesses during the stay at home order, employment laws, consumer laws, child support and custody, and Texas’ moratorium on evictions, all addressed in the guide spearheaded by Brown.
“She was already extremely busy,” Reid says, “and I think she’s added more to her plate in light of everything going on with the pandemic.”
In June, Brown stepped into the role of Chair-Elect of the Board of Directors of Houston Volunteer Lawyers. She is also the new Disaster Preparedness Committee Co-Chair for the Houston Bar Association.
In 2018, Brown received the Pro Bono Coordinator Award from the State Bar of Texas and, in the same year, was recognized as one of Houston’s “40 Under 40” by the Houston Business Journal for her volunteerism.
She serves on committees for Kids in Need of Defense and the State Bar of Texas’ Legal Services to the Poor in Civil Matters.
Brown is matter of fact about her pro bono work.
“There are things that only lawyers can do,” she says. “I think that everyone who holds a law license has an obligation to give back to the extent that they can.
“Not everyone can afford a lawyer,” she says, which makes pro bono work “a moral imperative.”
“As a lawyer, you hold the keys for justice for people who otherwise wouldn’t get justice.”
“I think that everyone who holds a law license has an obligation to give back to the extent that they can.”