The law students acted as aids to a top official from the now-and-forever infamous oil company, BP. In that role they wrote memorandums that gave BP a better perspective on how to allocate their $20 billion dollar recovery fund to a broader group of affected citizens than the oil company had once thought possible. According to Margaret Pollard, one of the students who contributed to the memorandums, ''[The students] presented [BP with a new strategy that involved] thinking more outside the box, especially since due to the ripple effect, a lot more people were affected than those [originally identified]. We used
legal support to encourage [Ken Feinberg, administrator of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility,] to also focus on people that were farther removed from the spill.''
Feinberg sat with the students, who had been gathering as much information on the fund as possible. Among the information gathered and issues studied by the students were loss claims issued, tax problems, and environmental offset issues. The idea that sparked the George Washington University
Law student participation came from Professor Alan Morrison, the Lerner Family Associate Dean for Public Interest and Public Service Law at George Washington University. Morrison has known Feinberg for years and had planned to meet with the BP administrator to discuss the recovery fund. After seeing several students engaged in service-focused efforts, Morrison asked them to tag along.
Morrison said, ''[The students] came to me wanting to do something about it, and I knew Mr. Feinberg was the special master on this, and he knew I wouldn't take up his time if I didn't think the students would produce something useful.'' Morrison continued, ''They were just interested in helping out people who are in need of help, and if they were nervous, they hid it well. All of them were particularly drawn to work on a project of significant practical importance.''
