Tuesday, January 8, 2008

The Second Day



It is great weather here. The temperature is in the 70s and there is a nice breeze to take away the fog of the humidity. We set out bright and early for our first day of work here. This first picture is of Bryan, Nick & Christine outside our hotel right before we set off.



We are working with New Orleans Legal Assistance (NOLA), which is a legal services organization with 4 branches all over Southeastern Louisiana. We are working with an attorney named David Koen. David works mainly on Predatory Lending issues. As you can imagine, there is a lot to do on the subject here and we had a good introductory meeting this morning.



The first project was to do some research on whether the threat of sanctions by opposing counsel can lead to a conflict of interest. The students did some great research and submitted a memo on the subject to David and his co-counsel. Here they are hard at work...




The other project that I worked on involved investigating a man who NOLA has a judgment against on behalf of four families here in New Orleans. He owes a substantial amount of money to the four families. The man was later arrested for defrauding people by promising to renovate their homes, but ended up taking their thousands of dollars and never even starting any renovations. The task was to try and find information on where this man has lived in the past and whether he had or has any assets so that he can fulfill the terms of NOLA's judgment against him.


Tomorrow should be very exciting with a presentation at a local Senior Center and a client interview in the afternoon.


The people at NOLA are all very friendly and willing to help out. As you can imagine, they have a lot of student volunteers coming in and out, including a lot of law students. It is great to see all of the interest in helping out down here, but sad that things are such a mess. David was telling us that the Prosecutor recently resigned due to the disarray at the Prosecutor's office. Things are slow moving. There is too much work, too many cases and very few attorneys to handle it all.


We are going to head out for dinner shortly and I will hopefully be eating some Jambalaya or some other awesome Cajun dish. I will write more soon...

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