Lawyers nationwide are helping their colleagues on the Mississippi Gulf Coast get back in business after Hurricane Katrina, the Gulfport attorney who is president of The Mississippi Bar said here Thursday.

The state bar association has received thousands of dollars in contributions from attorneys in other states, and those dollars are being distributed to solo practitioners and small law firms whose offices were either destroyed or severely damaged by the storm, bar president Joy Lambert Phillips said.

Phillips, who is the state bar’s 100th president and first woman president, made her comments as guest speaker at Thursday’s Port City Kiwanis club meeting.

She said the state has 8,170 active attorneys, mainly solo practitioners or members of small law firms. All of them are required to be members of the bar association, which works to ensure professional competence and ethical conduct among attorneys.

About 1,000 of them, or about 15 percent of the state total, are based in the state’s six coastal counties.

The center of Katrina, the nation’s worst natural disaster, struck the Mississippi Coast on Aug. 29.

&#8220Our focus needed to be to help those attorneys get back in business,” said Phillips, who is general counsel for Hancock Bank.

Phillips said the job of presiding over the bar generally takes about half an attorney’s time but, since Katrina struck during her term in office, the job has taken more than half her time.

&#8220There is no doubt in my mind that the Coast will rebuild,” Phillips said, adding that the area will probably be rebuilt bigger and better than before but that it will take years for such reconstruction to be accomplished.

&#8220It’s going to be a long time,” she said.

Hundreds of lawyers, mainly from Mississippi, who remained able to help people with legal questions after the storm have done so, under The Mississippi Bar’s auspices, Phillips said.

The president of the bar’s young lawyers division, Amanda K. Jones of Jackson, devoted six to eight weeks to organize the effort with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Phillips said.

&#8220Some of (the questions) were about how to get a death certificate,” for a family member who had died, Phillips said of the kinds of questions those lawyers helped answer.

The bar association’s president-elect-designee, who is in line to become president in 2007, is Vicksburg attorney Robert R. Bailess. He would be the first Vicksburg resident to hold that office in 90 years.

The current organization of the state bar association was begun in January 1906. Its second president, Murray F. Smith, was a state senator from Vicksburg who also participated in the state’s 1890 constitutional convention, Phillips said.

Its president 10 years later, in 1917, was also a Vicksburg resident, A.A. Armistead.

The bar association’s executive director is Larry Houchins, who is originally from Vicksburg, Phillips noted.

Phillips said her office is in the 15th floor of the Hancock Bank building in Gulfport and that its windows were blown in during the storm. Bank operations and personnel were moved from there to backup data centers in Chicago and Atlanta for about three or four months after the storm, she added.