With Evictions On The Rise, LA Lawyers Volunteer To Defend Tenants

With evictions rising as the city of Los Angeles peels away pandemic-era tenant protections, more tenants are going to court without an attorney. To try to meet demand, new efforts are underway to get lawyers from some of the city’s top law firms to help out.

The Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, a nonprofit that supports homelessness prevention priorities outlined by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, has so far recruited about 200 lawyers through an initiative launched in October to increase pro bono eviction defense aid across the city.

Mayor’s Fund CEO Conway Collis said solving the city’s homelessness crisis isn’t just about moving unhoused people indoors — it’s about preventing people from losing their housing in the first place.

“We need to prevent the human tragedy of people becoming homeless and being evicted if the ongoing effort to move people off the streets and end homelessness is going to be successful,” Collis said.

Thousands housed, thousands more facing eviction

Unlike in criminal court, where the accused are given public defenders if they can’t afford to pay for an attorney, tenants at risk of losing their housing in eviction court have no right to free legal representation. As a result, most tenants have to fight evictions on their own, facing landlords who have attorneys 95% of the time, according to UCLA researchers.

The outcomes in eviction court can be devastating for low-income tenants with nowhere else to go. Housing researchers often call eviction court the frontlines of homelessness, and city leaders are starting to focus on this area of law as key to grappling with the region’s ever-increasing unhoused population.

Bass promised to house 17,000 people during her first year in office, which concludes next month. Her administration has said that close to 19,000 have entered interim housing so far. But at the same time, more than 66,000 eviction notices have gone out to L.A. tenants, according to data collected from landlords by the city’s housing department.

In late October, Bass called on lawyers throughout the city to help confront this crisis by volunteering for pro bono eviction defense work.

“Everyone has to have skin in the game as we work towards solutions that prevent Angelenos from falling into homelessness in the first place,” she said in a press release.

What’s happened so far

The mayor’s office has met with some of the city’s top law firms to spur interest in pro bono eviction work. David Lash, the managing counsel for pro bono and public interest services at O'Melveny & Myers, has been heeding the mayor’s call to get more attorneys in the pipeline.

“Eviction cases proceed very rapidly,” Lash said, and it’s crucial that lawyers are trained on how best to assist tenants within that short window of time. “It is a very specialized, nuanced area of the law. It's not something that you can just waltz into, and be prepared to go to trial.”

Lash said he saw firsthand how much difference a lawyer can make in eviction court when he participated in a UCLA Law School study a few years ago.

“We tracked 150 cases in the downtown L.A. Superior Court housing court where the tenant was unrepresented and the landlord did have counsel,” Lash said. “The tenant lost 150 times. At the same time, legal aid organizations were getting favorable results in 90% of the cases where they were representing tenants.”

Collis said the Mayor’s Fund has put $1.1 million per year, for the next four years, toward hiring staff at L.A.’s top legal aid law firms, who will coordinate the efforts of attorneys who’ve volunteered to work pro bono.

So far the initiative has reached about two-thirds of its goal of getting 300 attorneys to volunteer. Most of them have begun receiving training from local legal aid organizations. After those trainings, they can help run clinics where they give tenants advice on how to handle their own cases.

Fewer attorneys are ready to take on full cases and represent tenants in court. Collis hopes that with more training, many will have that capacity soon. The L.A. city council proposed a “right to counsel” policy back in February that would provide tenants in eviction court with free attorneys.

“It's not clear we're going to have that in the foreseeable future,” Collis said. “In the meantime, the gap needs to be filled by pro bono attorneys.”

Eviction law is very different from their day job

One of the attorneys who has volunteered in recent weeks is Evan Jackson. As an associate attorney at O'Melveny & Myers, he typically handles a wide range of civil litigation — employment law, real estate and trademark issues to name a few. But housing is new for him.

“As an L.A. native, when I was kind of looking for [pro bono] options, this one just stood out,” Jackson said. “You don't need to be an L.A. native to know that homelessness is arguably the biggest problem the city has.”

Working with the Legal Aid Foundation of L.A., Jackson has joined tenants over Zoom to provide legal advice about how they can best defend themselves from eviction. He hopes to receive more training and be able to fully represent clients in court soon.

Unlike Jackson’s usual work — involving clients that can afford to pay attorneys to argue cases that can go on for years — eviction cases move fast, often leaving unrepresented tenants feeling confused and powerless.

“The speed was a bit surprising,” Jackson said, noting that tenants only have five business days to file an answer to an eviction in court. “Expecting a layperson or someone with not as much legal experience to be able to file an answer in five days — that sounded daunting to me.”

When representing tenants facing eviction, the goal is to keep tenants housed. Sometimes that means arguing against a wrongful eviction in court. In other cases, tenants will have to vacate. But attorneys say they can still help renters leave on favorable terms and reach settlements that keep an eviction off their record, making it easier to find new housing.

Recruitment efforts are ongoing, said Collis with the Mayor’s Fund. But he admits that this initiative’s success won’t result in every L.A. tenant getting an attorney.

Even if the program reaches its goal, about 80% of Angelenos facing eviction will still be without an attorney.

“There’s a great deal of more work to be done,” Collis said.