Four years post-Katrina, LMA members come to the aid of the big easy.

• Author: Rubenstein, Norm
• Position: Legal Marketing Association

You don't have to hail from New Orleans to feel a special connection to the Big Easy. For some people, the connection starts with the food--food so indescribably delicious that one seafood-stuffed eggplant or bread pudding souffle and you're addicted. For others, it may begin with a trip to Jazzfest or a vacation foray to Mardi Gras. But regardless of how the infatuation starts, it's incurable. So when Hurricane Katrina did in 2005 what so many of her predecessors had threatened but failed to do--challenged New Orleans' vitality and viability--it served as a call to action for the "extended N'awlins Diaspora."

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Semmes: My husband and I both have family members in New Orleans, so we feel a special connection to the city. We spend a chunk of time in Louisiana every year and when Katrina hit, we were looking for our own place there. To say that Katrina changed the lives of everyone we know in New Orleans doesn't come close to describing how personally we reacted to the storm.

Rubenstein: My parents are New Orleanians who were in their 80s when they lost their home to Katrina. Although I moved east decades ago, I visit New Orleans many times a year, and after Katrina, I made frequent trips to survey the virtual demolition site their home had become. I was frustrated with how badly government at all levels had f ailed all Louisianans, and increasingly annoyed with myself for failing to make a significant contr ibution to the "ReNew Orleans" movement.

Semmes: I felt the same way, and so Norm and I considered it providential when LMA connected us with The Pro Bono Project. The project is a New Orleans-based 501(c)(3) that, for the past 23 years, has worked with volunteers from the private bar to provide high-quality civil legal services to citizens living below the poverty line in a six-parish area surrounding New Orleans.

Rubenstein: One of its volunteers had the idea of contacting LMA in hopes of gaining visibility among law firms outside of Louisiana. While the project has done extraordinary work since 1986, its mission intensified and evolved in the wake of Katrina. The nature of the services with which its clients sought help also reflected the abject chaos into which New Orleanians were thrown post-hurricane.

Semmes: Joanna Broussard, a Chicagoan who helps The Pro Bono Project with marketing, fundraising and media relations, reached out to LMA. That's how we started down a path that led us to...