Although he has lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, since 1999, Rob Harrington has deep roots in New Orleans – a sister, her family, and many friends and colleagues from the 11 years he practiced law there. That gave him reason enough to track Hurricane Katrina closely as it bore down on the city in August 2005. Given his position as co-chair of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Harrington knew he could offer concrete assistance in the storm’s aftermath. A non-profit organization established in 1963 at the behest of President Kennedy, the Lawyers’ Committee marshals the pro bono resources of lawyers to address issues of equal opportunity and civil rights throughout the country.

“Barbara Arnwine [’76], the executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee, called me the day before Katrina hit and said, ‘Rob, this is going to be huge. We have to help.’ So we were there from the time the storm hit until today,” Harrington says with pride. In fact, the Lawyers’ Committee – through its staff attorneys and the assistance of lawyers around the country – has been integrally involved in assisting communities throughout the Gulf Coast.

“We knew there was at least the potential for problems with housing and the equitable distribution of resources in the storm’s immediate aftermath,” Harrington recalls. “We had to strategically address the challenge of getting resources to folks who are traditionally left out.”

In fact, issues relating to Hurricane Katrina have “spanned all of what we do,” says Harrington – housing, community development, voting rights, environmental justice, business development, and education. Within weeks, the Committee became counsel of record against FEMA, “to basically force FEMA to follow its governing statutes,” says Harrington. The Committee’s Housing Project has been active both in helping other community organizations assist in the recovery, and in challenging the “amazing housing discrimination” that was pervasive after the storm, with landlords refusing to rent to minorities, and municipal regulations in parishes near New Orleans disproportionately blocking the resettlement of minorities in neighboring parishes.

“We’ve also been very involved in helping out with the post-Katrina elections, which have been very difficult because so many of the polling places had been destroyed or moved,” Harrington continues, giving full credit to Arnwine’s “boundless energy” as well as the Committee’s staff. “And there is obviously environmental fallout and concern – questions about how you rebuild the area to avoid some of the traditional environmental justice issues that we have had in that part of Louisiana.”

Harrington will stay on the Committee’s Board, and hopes to remain on the executive committee when his term as co-chair ends in September, but has taken on a number of new projects. A new member of the Law School’s Board of Visitors, Harrington is also the chair-elect of the Board of Charlotte’s Levine Museum of the New South, which focuses on Southern history post-Reconstruction.

“I worry that clients will ask, ‘When do you practice law?’” Harrington says with a laugh. “The answer is, a lot!” A partner with Robinson Bradshaw & Hinson in Charlotte, Harrington maintains a broad commercial litigation practice spanning the areas of trade practice disputes, fiduciary bank work, and employment related litigation. But his firm’s tradition of actively supporting pro bono and community service – a continuing legacy, he says, of the firm’s founding partners, who include Russell Robinson ’56, chairman of The Duke Endowment – has helped Harrington to act on his own commitment to volunteerism. His work earned him the honor of being named a “Diversity Catalyst” by Charlotte Magazine in 2004, after he took a leadership role in establishing a Mecklenberg County Bar committee dedicated to dealing with issues of diversity in the county bar and within law firms.

“Our firm has always viewed practice a little bit differently. We all work hard and have very challenging practices. But we also emphasize the need for balance and community involvement – everything from Russell’s chairmanship of The Duke Endowment, to coaching Little League. These are bedrocks of the firm.”

Harrington says that only the prospect of joining Robinson Bradshaw could have dislodged him and his wife, Sharon Carr Harrington ’89, from their lives in New Orleans, where they were “firmly embedded,” he as a partner at Stone Pigman and involved in community work, and she as the director of the city’s Department of Sanitation. He was actively recruited by other Duke alumni at the Charlotte firm after he acted as its local counsel on a case in federal court in New Orleans, and then met Robinson at the American Law Institute when both were advisors on its Agency Project.