Conclusion

RAY BRESCIA AND ERIC K. STERN

Whether it is dealing with hostage negotiations, climate change, critical incidents at sea or on land, police violence, pandemics, or human rights viola­tions, lawyers are, more and more, thrust into situations of crisis.

How Do Lawyers Define a Crisis Situation in Their Work and Does This Vary Depending on the Context?

The first concept to emerge from the contributions to this volume is that crisis lawyering, though similar in some respects to traditional lawyering, does have unique features that differentiate it from what most lawyers do in their day- to-day work. For most individuals and organizations, in many instances in which a lawyer is enlisted to help address a problem, that problem may seem like a crisis to that individual or entity.

In the crisis situation, by contrast, the stakes may be just as high as in the traditional context (and they are always high), but there are a range of vari­ables that differentiate the crisis situation from the traditional problem the lawyer is asked to solve. First and foremost, the crisis situation tends to unfold on a much more compressed or accelerated timeframe than the traditional legal problem space.

In contrast, a critical component of crisis lawyers is the unsettled and un­certain nature of the facts, risks, client interests, laws, and policies that may come into play during a crisis situation. Given the unsettled nature of the crisis situations that crisis lawyering must resolve, there may be little guid­ance or training that helps a lawyer maneuver within and through them. Each crisis is, in a way, unique, presenting novel challenges and threats. And yet, as these pages suggest, there is a repertoire of crisis lawyering skills that lawyers who work on crises—from such radically different practice areas as serving as counsel to governments and media outlets to representing immigrants in detention and homeless people living on the streets—that appears to emerge from a case- or career-retrospective review of the work such crisis lawyers do on a day-to-day basis.

Who Is the Client in Crisis Lawyering?

In traditional lawyering, the client is often easy to identify. An individual or organization comes to the lawyer with a discrete problem that the client wants solved. Perhaps the lawyer works with the client on an ongoing basis, as in-house counsel, or is simply on retainer. The lawyer makes him- or herself available to the client in service of that client's current needs. Once the dust settles and the problem is solved or resolved, the lawyer may sit down with the client and try to plan to avoid the problem recurring. In most instances, while the lawyer and client should consider the likely consequences of a cli­ent's course of action on third parties, the concerns tend to center around making decisions in light of the best interests of the client. While the potential ramifications of a particular course of conduct on third parties, and whether those third parties might have recourse against the client if their rights and interests are affected, the lawyer's client is always at the center of the calculus, and the lawyer will focus mostly on the client's interests over those of third parties. This focus on client interests, whatever the problem or the solution, presupposes the fact that the traditional lawyer typically knows who he or she is serving and where the primary duty of professional care resides. Fur­thermore, the lawyer strives to develop clear lines of communication with the client so that the lawyer knows just what the client wants and when she wants it: at the outset of the representation, as that representation moves forward, and when it concludes.

Few of these conditions reliably hold in crisis lawyering. First of all, the lawyer in the crisis lawyering context may not always know who the client re­ally is in a given crisis.

Similarly, lawyers embedded in crisis field teams, such as the leadership team of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Joint Field Of­fice, are charged with supporting the Federal Coordinating Officer in charge but also report to the Office of Chief Counsel and face unique professional du­ties to ensure compliance with regulations, policy, the law, and ultimately the Constitution. When FEMA leaders “push the envelope” and test the bound­aries of their authorities in responding to acute humanitarian needs—or at­tempt to cut red tape or other administrative corners in the interest of crisis expediency—lawyers may experience turbulent crosscurrents and dilemmas of divided loyalties. Furthermore, lawyers may observe breaches of ethics or other forms of wrongdoing and face conflicts between collegiality and profes­sional obligation to “blow the whistle.” Note that these issues also arose in parallel fashion for the Swedish government lawyers (described in chapter 13) engaging in crisis lawyering, despite differences in the substantive legal frame­work, organizational structures, and political-administrative culture.

Are the Ethical Rules Governing Lawyer Conduct and Standards of Care (Diligence) Relaxed in Crisis Situations?

Given that crisis lawyering often involves high-stakes matters that must be resolved in a compressed time frame under conditions of uncertainty, does and should crisis lawyering occur within a different ethical framework than traditional lawyering? The touchstone of professionalism for the lawyer is that he or she is expected to provide, at a minimum, competent services and must have adequate training and supervision to provide services that meet that base­line ethical standard. The crisis lawyer, by contrast, must operate in contexts in which it might be impossible for the lawyer to practice and prepare for such situations; indeed, even the best training or supervision may not prepare the lawyer to navigate novel situations of extreme uncertainty and high risk that emerge along a rapid, condensed time frame. The rules governing lawyer con­duct generally appear to lower the level of training and supervision that are required in routine settings where the stakes are low. In such low-risk settings, the degree of experience and oversight is relaxed where a lawyer can develop the competence to handle the matter with some ease.¹ There, we still expect the law­yer to perform at a basic level of competence, but we recognize that, when the stakes are low, the matter is not complex, and the lawyer can understand what is expected of him or her with little effort, then it is fairly easy for the lawyer to sat­isfy his or her ethical obligations to provide competent services in such settings.

At the same time, when a lawyer finds him- or herself in a crisis situation, is it appropriate to relax the requirement of competence, just as we would in a low-stakes setting where one can easily provide a basic level of care? Paradoxically, it might be that a higher standard of care might be expected when the stakes are high, as in crisis situations. But given the time frame within which a lawyer must act, and the unsettled nature of the legal issues that the lawyers must confront in crisis situations, is it appropriate to lower expectations and provide crisis lawyers with some leeway to make reason­able decisions given the situation—with all of its intendent pressures—and thereby create a new standard of competence appropriate for such situations?² Whether one is negotiating for the release of a kidnapped journalist, as con­tributor David McCraw does with surprising regularity in his work on behalf of the New York Times, or obtain freedom for an immigrant child being held in detention without access to a parent, as Sarah Rogerson does in her day- to-day crisis lawyering work, is it appropriate to raise our expectations, and the duty of care, for such lawyers? Or is it more aligned with the spirit of the rules governing ethical conduct to relax such requirements in such settings?

Some guidance regarding this issue may be found in the world of opera­tional (e.g., military, police, and emergency management) law. Where opera­tions take place at a rapid pace, legal advice must keep up with that pace lest the crucial decisions be made anyway—and without the benefit of even the most basic legal guidance. To the extent that issues are foreseeable and recur­ring, drawing upon well-developed and established opinions can help to speed up the process and enable well-prepared lawyers to keep up even in very high tempo operations. When problems are urgent, novel in important respects, and presenting in an organization or jurisdiction for the first time (which are all too common phenomena in crisis situations as we have defined them), lawyers face a common dilemma: provide advice that is “quick and dirty,” or be sidelined and provide no advice at all. In such situations, there is reason to believe that lawyers (and those who evaluate them and hold them accountable) may need to rethink their views of professional quality to take crisis operational tempo and working conditions into account. Note that the medical profession has made provision for this, introducing notions such as crisis standards of care, triage, and wilderness medicine. All of these reflect the idea that excellent professional performance may look very different at a mass casualty site or a remote field location as opposed to a planned procedure at a top-notch medical facility.³

What Are the Potential Value Conflicts and Conflicts of Interest That Emerge in Crisis Lawyering That May Not Arise in Traditional Lawyering Settings?

Crisis lawyering can create unforeseen and novel conflicts that the traditional lawyer rarely faces. One of the main reasons for this is that crises are rarely discrete, such as the problem a client may bring to a lawyer in the traditional lawyer-client relationship. The crisis lawyer must wrestle with the impact that a given crisis situation has on clients, for sure, but given the nature of crises and their cascading impacts in contexts characterized by complex interdependencies, there are often third parties who are deeply affected by a client's actions or inaction. These broader ramifications can sometimes place the crisis lawyer in a bind. As noted above, the traditional lawyer in private practice owes a duty of loyalty to his or her client, yet the crisis lawyer some­times faces conflicting duties, duties that are imposed on him or her based on the professional role the lawyer fills. But the crisis lawyer might also feel the moral weight of decisions he or she must make in situations where there is a high risk of harm to the broader community from a client's actions. This can sometimes create conflicts between the crisis lawyer's professional role and, quite simply, his or her humanity. In a traditional professional setting, the lawyer may (and sometimes must) consider the ramifications of his or her actions, in addition to those of the client, on third parties. Sometimes the consequences of the lawyer's actions on third parties can be profound: A prosecutor may work to confine a criminal defendant for the rest of his or her life; a bankruptcy filing on behalf of a client could wipe out the holdings of a fund that invests in the company that could represent the pensions of former employees. In the crisis situation, given what is at stake and the poten­tial consequences of client action or inaction in a given setting, the potential impact of the crisis lawyer's decision on third parties is almost always signifi­cant, which is another of the hallmarks of crisis lawyering. Given that crisis lawyering typically involves the risk that third parties will face significant con­sequences from a lawyer's decision regarding his or her client's current and future course of conduct, the crisis lawyer might feel an undertow from the conflicts that arise in such settings; this real likelihood of third-party harm in the crisis situation means the crisis lawyer will likely take into account that harm when counseling a client. In the traditional lawyering setting, the advocate may consider the prospect of third-party harm in order to minimize the risk his or her client will be held to account for such harm. In the crisis lawyering setting, the gravity of the potential harm to third parties justifies the lawyer taking that harm into account directly and conscientiously. These consequences are to be avoided in their own right, not merely because of the potential second-order effects on the lawyer's own client.

What is more, in movement lawyering crises, where the law is unfair and civil disobedience may be justified, this creates a potential conflict between the lawyer's duty to uphold the law and ethical imperatives to the client(s) to work to change the law, including counseling the client to violate the law. Sometimes the lawyer feels compelled to violate the law him- or herself. An­other classic dilemma—one that often arises for government lawyers—has to do with the situation where the law (or lesser rules and policies) have been set up with a different situation in mind and the law/rules become an obstacle to solving the problem. For example, should a lawyer demand that a client follow normal purchasing rules and competitive bidding procurement processes in dire, time-sensitive situations (e.g., humanitarian disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina and Maria) where materials are needed for saving lives? What about cases where security concerns may come into conflict with individual rights and liberties? What is more, Baher Azmy and hundreds of colleagues defend­ing Guantanamo detainees often found themselves on the other sides of such decisions, often fought against their consequences, and had to take dramatic actions—and risks—to resolve the tragic dilemmas that had been created.

How Do Lawyers Ensure Effective Lines of Communication in Crisis Situations?

Crisis situations, by their nature, are situations of high risk that must be resolved within an extremely accelerated time frame. Crisis lawyers must develop situational awareness, take into account the actual and potential risks to clients and third parties, make decisions with incomplete informa­tion, and make those decisions quickly. Because he or she is still a lawyer, the crisis lawyer must strive to develop meaningful lines of communications with clients so as to understand those clients' interests and needs and obtain any guidance they might offer the lawyer as to the course of action that he or she should take. But what if the crisis lawyer cannot speak to his or her client? Muneer Ahmad and Michael Wishnie recount their efforts to bring litigation to oppose the application of the travel ban imposed by the Donald Trump administration during its first days in office when their clients were cordoned off and held incommunicado in a facility at John F. Kennedy International Air­port. Similarly, Baher Azmy and the lawyers who represented detainees held at Guantanamo Bay had to commence litigation even to identify and speak with their clients. What these and other contributors show is that developing effective lines of communication with clients in crisis lawyering situations is not only imperative given the stakes and the time pressure of representation in such situations; it is often difficult if not impossible. Note that in the high- pressure and high-tempo environments typical of operational law—such as the military, law enforcement, and emergency management—and given the many demands on the time and attention of the leaders that lawyers are tasked to serve, lawyers may also find it difficult to gain access to the leaders they are supposed to advise and/or get a seat at the table where critical decisions are being made. This may be particularly difficult where stereotypes of lawyers as naysayers who erect obstacles to swift and decisive action prevail. This was a recurring challenge in both the US and Swedish contexts explored in chapter 13 by Eric K. Stern, Brad Kieserman, and their coauthors.

In addition to communication with clients, as spelled out by Jay Sullivan in chapter 16, lawyers in many settings (government and corporate) will need to work with communications professionals regarding internal and external messaging. The FEMA and Swedish Legal Advice in Crisis projects described in chapter 13 found that mutual understanding and close collaboration be­tween lawyers and communicators is helpful in making sure that communica­tion is not only legally correct and sustainable but also effective in reaching a variety of nonlawyer target groups as well as protecting the “brand” and legitimacy of the organization. As Sullivan points out, taking responsibility for organizational mistakes or negligence and doing what is required to main­tain viability in the court of public and media opinion may require publicly assuming responsibility and maintaining degrees of transparency that likely increase legal (and possibly financial) exposure in court.

What Expertise Must a Crisis Lawyer Possess in a Given Crisis Situation?

Carrie Bettinger-Lopezs client faced a situation many lawyers face: it seemed like she was out of options. While only a handful of clients see their cases resolved by the United States Supreme Court, Bettinger-Lopezs client had sustained her fight to the nation's highest court, but she lost there, finding any road to formal, domestic recourse foreclosed. But being out of domestic options did not mean it was the end of the proverbial road. Bettinger-Lopez brought her client's case before an international tribunal and saw the practices that were at the center of her client's lawsuit declared a violation of inter­national law. Sarah Rogerson's clients—immigrants in detention—seemed to have few options as well, but such limitations forced Rogerson and her col­leagues to generate more creative solutions to address their clients' needs. What is more, Lee Wang and the lawyers who fought to make the courthouses safe spaces for their clients ultimately had to engage in acts of civil disobedi­ence because they had pressed their clients' interests to the limits of the law and beyond. Traditional lawyers typically find their clients in situations the lawyers have seen before, and those lawyers have time-honored strategies for helping their clients address those situations. Crisis lawyers, in contrast, often find their clients in situations where the path forward may be uncharted. Given the nature of the work, crisis lawyers face novel situations of extreme complexity and must react to them within a limited time horizon. They must often develop expertise in a given subject-matter area implicated in the crisis quickly. They might turn to experts in the given field (if any exist) for guid­ance. They often have to assimilate knowledge from other professionals, as in the natural disaster setting, or they might have to create knowledge that did not exist before, sometimes creating a new field of law as the crisis unfolds, as was the case with the work of the Guantanamo Bay Bar Association.

How Do Crisis Lawyers Interact with Leaders and Other Constituencies in Crisis Situations, Including Other Professionals and Individuals from Other Disciplines?

The results of the case studies in this volume suggest that these issues tend to be intertwined, so we will discuss them together in this section. The high stakes involved in crisis lawyering and the truncated time frame within which decisions must be made require effective communication between the lawyer, constituents, leaders, third parties, and anyone who can help the lawyer gather information and respond to it effectively. In very different settings, John Travis Marshall (disaster recovery) and David Turetsky (election day lawyering) show how important func­tioning lines of communication are in crisis situations: across disciplines, with advocates and adversaries. While the traditional lawyer certainly needs effective lines of communication with critical constituencies, the nature of crisis lawyering casts in high relief the importance of efficient and effective lines of communica­tion to bring information to the lawyer about the nature of the crisis and its risks, as well as to communicate information to critical constituencies about the tactics and strategies that will be used to carry out the lawyer's legal guidance.

Facilitating coordinated approaches to complex, multidimensional, mul­tiagency problem-solving of the kind described in chapter 12 by Brian John­son and Nora Wilson on Maritime Operational Threat Response requires lawyers to work under crisis or quasi-crisis conditions with a broad range of generalists, experts on sometimes arcane subject-matter areas, professions, and domestic and international legal specialties. These will vary considerably across issues such as modern piracy, human trafficking, migration, maritime cyberattacks, outbreaks of infectious disease at sea, major narcotics or fish­eries violations, and others. These lawyers are engaged in a time-sensitive effort not only to interpret the law but also to deploy it as one dimension of a broader effort to promote interagency information-sharing and enhanced situational awareness. They seek to identify and weigh agency priorities and national interests while seeking to forge a consensus regarding courses of action and the division of responsibility among agencies with regard to the implementation of policy. Parallel issues emerge for FEMA lawyers working in Joint Field Offices comprising a broad range of federal agency representa­tives grouped into various emergency support functions under the National Incident Management framework, state government officials, and other so­cietal actors involved in response and recovery efforts with regard to natural disasters as noted in chapter 13 by Stern and Kieserman and their coauthors.

John Travis Marshall in chapter 7 and Eleanor Stein in chapter 8 describe efforts to address climate change and its impacts, which is a complex problem requiring complex solutions; lawyers may find themselves out of their depth when it comes to climate science. In such crisis settings and many others, law­yers must rely on expertise from other disciplines, and this can often become a hallmark of crisis lawyering itself: the crisis lawyer must often work and learn to communicate with other professionals (communications professionals, en­gineers, medical doctors, scientists, public health officials, military officers, law enforcement, fire and rescue services, etc.) in order to develop a complete un­derstanding of the risks inherent in the crisis situation and to craft solutions to address and minimize those risks in an effective and holistic way. In crisis situ­ations, legal solutions are rarely the only solutions that will address the problem. This often means that the crisis lawyer must come to the crisis situation with a degree of professional humility—to recognize his or her own limitation when it comes to understanding the crisis, as well as the solutions that might emerge that could potentially respond to it. The crisis lawyer must also identify and de­velop a familiarity with, and even the vocabulary of, the disciplines that might aid in his or her work in resolving any given crisis. One of the critical elements of legal practice generally is for the lawyer to “know what she does not know.” In the crisis lawyering setting, it is imperative for the lawyer to recognize that the depth of his or her knowledge about crisis situations and potential solutions to address the risks of such settings runs deep and that the real limitations on the lawyer's knowledge mean that he or she must not only communicate with but also rely on the expertise of other professionals.

Are There Common Guiding Principles for Crisis Lawyering That Emerge from These Contributions?

Scott Westfahl in chapter 15 and this concluding chapter help to define some of the contours of crisis lawyering as a field of practice. Crisis lawyering is a prod­uct of the nature of the situation the lawyer finds him- or herself in, given the stakes, the risks, the time pressures, and the consequences of action and inac­tion. Given these components of crisis lawyering, a picture of the field emerges from the narratives and images portrayed in these pages. Crisis lawyering requires a lucid situational awareness; a problem-solving orientation; a critical knowledge base of the legal and practical ramifications of the client's conduct and options for future decision-making; well-developed ethical judgment; an appreciation for the real and potential risks inherent in the situation; clear lines of communication both within an organization and the broader community that enable the free flow of information and tactical direction; a willingness to enlist guidance from disciplines outside the law; and the humility to take into account the perspectives and expertise of those other disciplines.

Can One Plan and Train for Crisis Lawyering?

If crisis lawyering is a new field of practice, is there specific education and train­ing that a lawyer can undertake to plan to work in this field? Muneer Ahmad and Michael Wishnie, Scott Westfahl, Brian Wilson and Nora Johnson, and Eric Stern and his coauthors help to identify some approaches that have proven effective when it comes to training law students and lawyers to engage in crisis lawyering. There is no substitute for experience in crisis lawyering, and a crisis lawyer gains experience by engaging in the field of crisis management, as the contributions to this work demonstrate. Yet as the questions set forth in this conclusion seem to indicate, and even though every crisis has its unique fea­tures, crisis lawyering involves a set of practices and generic approaches to crisis situations that tend to be helpful across a broad range of crises.

Because crises present extraordinary challenges to lawyers and it is critical to “get it right the first time” in complex, dynamic, high-stakes processes and events, it seems prudent to leverage actual experience with virtual experience through dedicated education, training, and exercises—all of which are rela­tively underdeveloped in today's legal community, and not just in the United States. The results of the FEMA and Swedish Legal Advice in Crisis projects described in chapter 13 suggest that in-service training and exercise methods largely developed for crisis preparedness writ large (as well as for other educa­tional purposes) can be helpful. Lawyers can further develop their understand­ing and ability to work with other professions under crisis conditions through tailored role-plays, teaching cases, simulations, red-teaming, and other similar techniques. These enable lawyers to practice and develop crisis skills and role empathy and to hone the ability to interact heedfully with teammates from other professions in high-tempo and high-pressure situations.

For example, the Maritime Operational Threat Response functions de­scribed by Wilson and Johnson in chapter 12 have benefited from regular “war games,” including not only sharing lessons learned from previous cases but also scenario exercises in which lawyers have the opportunity to work with other professionals to rehearse and practice interagency problem-solving skills relevant to crisis management.

Returning to the literature on crisis leadership described in the introduction to this volume, crisis lawyering also faces the following challenges: preparing, sense-making, decision-making, meaning-making, ending and accounting, and learning. As we have seen throughout this volume, the authors describe the many ways they have grappled with these challenges in their work.

Preparing involves having systems in place to respond to crises as well as a disposition toward effective crisis management; understanding the role that leaders and lawyers play in such management; and a commitment to address-

ing the crisis in a meaningful, effective, ethical, and legitimate way. The expe­riences described by our authors take place in a variety of contexts, ranging from ad hoc to highly organized, planned, trained, and rehearsed, although the old adage that “no plan survives contact with the enemy” demonstrably applies to highly prepared contexts as well when it comes to crisis lawyering. Many of the chapters throughout this work address questions related to the authors' varying degrees of preparedness for crisis, as noted in the immedi­ately preceding discussion of planning and training.

Experience and anticipation are also key elements of preparedness for crisis situations. In some lawyering contexts, one may know that the crisis is coming. In fact, the lawyer might know the season in which certain types of disasters are more likely to occur and /or receive a few days' warning regarding heightened risk. She might know more or less when a hurricane is going to hit and might have a good sense of its strength and projected trajectory, and she can try to prepare and plan accordingly. If she practices in an area like election law, such as David Turetsky, she may know the exact day on which election law issues will require an emergency response. Even when a lawyer who may deal with crisis situations may not always know the exact day on which a crisis will occur, the na­ture of the lawyer's work—whether it is David McCraw's efforts on behalf of the New York Times or Baher Azmy's advocacy as a human rights lawyer—may mean that he or she is thrust into crisis situations with some regularity. And though the nature of the crisis may change, maintaining one's composure in the face of such crises is critical to effective crisis management. Given the nature of the work, the knowledge that such crises are likely to occur is perhaps the best preparation for crisis situations. At the same time, however, the crisis may be completely unfore­seen, in which case the nature of the crisis requires creativity and commitment to the lawyer's core values and dedication to pursuing the client's best interests in uncertain settings and against long odds, as reflected in the experiences of Sarah Rogerson, Lee Wang, and Muneer Ahmad and Michael Wishnie. Similarly, other forms of natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis as well as crises sparked by human adversaries or other forms of adversity may manifest with little or no notice and may require lawyers to ramp up their efforts very abruptly.

The second challenge is that of sense-making. When facing this challenge, lawyers may be involved in responding to warning signals and/or warning others regarding impending/escalating crises; clarifying the core values and identifying stakeholders relevant to the case; identifying and critically evaluat­ing historical analogies/precedents; and identifying alternative scenarios (e.g., worst-case, most likely, best-case). In this regard, lawyers can play a key role with regard to sense-making as demonstrated by Brian Wilson and Nora John­son's chapter regarding interagency coordination of maritime threat response. Lawyers can help determine which agencies, missions, statutes, and national interests are relevant to the problem at hand. Lawyers in that space play a key role in developing institutional memory and serving as repositories of precedent that can help to clarify and guide crisis policy-making. Similarly, such prece­dents can serve as historical analogies helping to clarify alternative options and scenario trajectories for the case. Similarly, in the election law context, David Turetsky emphasizes the need for lawyers to maintain situational awareness at individual polling stations and to contribute to statewide situational awareness by their reporting. This role includes monitoring warning signs of irregularities or inefficiencies that might influence voting. Turetsky's findings, like those of Stern and Kieserman and their coauthors in the Advice in Crisis project, em­phasize the importance of proximity and centrality; it is critical to get in early and seek a seat at the table in order to be able to keep track of the informa­tion flow and detect problems as soon as possible to maximize one's potential to influence the course of events in positive ways. Similarly, the FEMA lawyers and their counterparts in Sweden as described by those same authors play a critical role in developing situational awareness and clarifying stakeholders and core values in disaster/crisis response and recovery. Furthermore (and this is relevant to both sense- and decision-making), lawyers play an indispensable role in clarifying the range (and boundaries) of permissible action by identify­ing authorities, prohibitions, and ethical imperatives that enable and constrain government action in crisis.

The next challenge lawyers in crisis situations face is decision-making, which entails developing technical expertise in bodies of law relevant to the situation; serving as a wise counselor who engages in problem-solving; engaging in risk assessment; serving as a mediator and consensus-builder; overseeing effective processes; and sometimes managing operations. Christy Lopez, in her work at the US Department of Justice confronting a crisis in police-community re­lations, helped to play a critical role in moving communities toward decisive action to overcome systemic and chronic injustices. Eleanor Stein, in her work as a judge facilitating an administrative process involving many stakeholders with diverse interests, helped to move the parties toward consensus on how to address the critical issue of climate change, which involved process monitor­ing, mediation, management, and decision-making throughout the process. In terms of natural disaster management and response, John Travis Marshall de­scribed his work to create a long-term recovery response to a crisis that entailed many instances of critical decision-making.

Lawyers in crisis situations often play a critical role in meaning-making and messaging, which often involve issue-framing as well as shaping strategic nar­ratives. This can also entail advising and participating in symbolic actions and behaviors that arise in crisis situations, like mourning, commemoration, mobi­lization, and apology. Lawyers often play a part in these rituals, particularly from a legal perspective. The chapters contributed by Jay Sullivan and Muneer Ahmad and Michael Wishnie describe effective communications strategies in crisis situ­ations that help reframe the context in ways that are beneficial to the client, may help defuse the situation, or may (conversely) heighten tensions to create space for change and effective interventions. Stern and Kieserman and their coauthors elaborate on the ways in which lawyers can participate in such practices to en­sure they reflect and incorporate appropriate understandings of the legal per­spective on the crisis, while recognizing that effective crisis management is likely to require balancing legal and other political or reputational concerns. Similarly, Caroline Bettinger-Lopez, Baher Azmy, and Lee Wang in their contributed chap­ters describe the efforts of lawyers in different crisis situations to bring attention to those situations through both traditional and unconventional advocacy strat­egies, helping to highlight injustice while shaping a narrative of empowerment surrounding their advocacy. Christy Lopez faced challenges of communicating the proper role for the Department of Justice in interjecting itself into a local cri­sis situation that had national ramifications. Carmen Huertas-Noble and her co­authors similarly reframed crises of health disparities as embodiments of racial and economic inequality and have developed effective legal crisis-management responses to the injustices their client-communities face.

Lawyers in crisis situations also must confront the challenge of ending and accounting. As some of the examples in this volume reveal, identifying the “end” of the crisis can itself be a challenge. Baher Azmy was able to secure freedom for his client, but there are still detainees held at Guantanamo. Muneer Ahmad and Michael Wishnies team had to decide when it was time to pass along the crisis-intervention work with respect to the acute crisis it faced to other teams. Caroline Bettinger-Lopez followed her client's lead on when the crisis had not ended, even though most lawyers would likely accept that she had come to the proverbial end of the road—that is, when the client lost her case before the Su­preme Court. And sometimes a crisis is not over, even though the lawyer's role in addressing it for the time being may come to an end, as reflected in the work of Eleanor Stein. She continues to work on climate-crisis response efforts in her work, but the specific case on which she worked as an administrative law judge has come to its conclusion. Similarly, Richard Pinner's work advocating on be­half of the homeless in New York City continues through the work of many others, even though the initial efforts reached some obvious milestones—like victories before New York State's highest court in which the fundamental right to shelter under the state constitution was established.

Finally, although lawyers in crisis situations typically do face a degree of novelty in each crisis situation, effective crisis lawyering involves learning from the crisis and developing systems to respond to similar crises in the fu­ture (which would bring the lawyer back to the “preparing” challenge). Scott Westfahl, John Travis Marshall, and Muneer Ahmad and Michael Wishnie all are explicit about their efforts to “train for crisis,” which is also reflected in the chapters by Stern and Kieserman and their coauthors. What is more, the entire effort of this volume has been to draw lessons from the different crisis lawyering contexts described here so that we may learn from them and be better prepared—as lawyers and leaders—to respond to crisis situations.

But crisis lawyering, as the experiences recounted here indicate, is really an approach, one that requires a particular set of skills more than a body of knowl­edge. That approach is one that manifests itself in professional humility; a will­ingness and an ability to gather and assimilate information rapidly and in an open-minded way; a commitment to communication with clients, constituents, community leaders and representatives, and affected third parties; and, above all, an understanding of the lawyer's role in crisis situations—both its capaci­ties and its limitations. The contributions to this work paint a vivid picture of what this crisis lawyering approach entails so that lawyers, and the individuals, entities, and communities they serve, will understand the critical role lawyers can and must play in addressing and resolving crises. In the wake of COVID- 19 and ongoing and pervasive threats to the rule of law, the need to cope with crises looms ever larger as a challenge and imperative for contemporary society in general and lawyers in particular. We hope that this work has made it clear that lawyers have had and will continue to have a crucial part to play in this effort and must be prepared for action, effective in their service, courageous in defending values, comprehensive in their approach, and wise in their judgment even when facing issues shrouded in the fog of crisis.

NOTES

1 See American Bar Association, Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1.1, Comments 1 & 2 (Aug. 2018) (describing level of legal skill and training required in a given situation depends on what is at stake and the complexity of the matter).

2 For example, under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a lawyer and party can be sanctioned if their conduct lacks merit or a good faith basis after an inquiry “reasonable under the circumstances,” thus recognizing that these rules require a level of attention and thoroughness that varies with “the circumstances.” Fed. R. Civ. Proc. 11 (2017).

3 For a discussion of standards of care for medical professionals in crisis situations, see, e.g., Lawrence O. Gostin & Dan Hanfling, National Preparedness for a Catastrophic Emergency: Crisis Standards of Care, 302 J. of Am. Med. Ass'n 2365 (2009).