Legal aid amid bureaucracy

Disaster lawyers navigate bureaucratic impediments to insurance claims and settlement and federal recovery and relief, and they act as third-party facilitators for disaster-affected clients to help enable their survival efforts. The roles of such lawyers in navigating paperwork and bureaucratic processes on behalf of survivors, while assisting them in meeting basic daily needs, has become seen as being integral to recovery in these processes. We utilise findings from semi-structured interviews with disaster law practitioners working with disaster survivors in the south-eastern United States (SEUS) to examine the bureaucratic socio-legal life of disasters. We marshal bureaucratic violence literature to analyse disaster law practitioners’ perspectives of the socio-legal nature of disasters in the SEUS, demonstrating that the bureaucratic technologies of recovery are primary obstacles to expedient recovery and successful legal work with survivors.