Justice Innovation
A new initiative, Frontline Justice, has just been launched to build a new set of justice workers who can serve people with legal needs & close the justice gap.
This new group is planning to grow a workforce of justice workers, reform policies and regulations around who can provide legal help, and engage communities in how people are served.
The group is seeking a CEO currently, and has an impressive founding team and leadership council.
As more courts use text messages to improve litigants’ access to justice, many wonder exactly how to set up texting.
What are the words, schedule, and flow of text messages for a court to use?
From our experience with working with criminal, traffic, housing, and other civil courts in doing text message projects, we have some options for courts to use.
There are 3 models:
We go through each texting model and share a sample script that courts have used in the past.
The goal of this reminder text message flow is to increase participation rates, and reduce default rates for a hearing. It is a straightforward reminder script, focused on dates, times, and locations. There is also a mention of the consequences of default.
A second model for court reminders adds more services into the messages.
It can have a 10-5-1 day reminder schedule, but the messages also add in links and referrals to self-help services.
These could be links to workshops, self-help centers, hotlines, right to counsel, navigators, or other expert assistance services.
In this model, the focus is less on reminders and more on connections to services.
The text message flow would start if the litigant texts a keyword into a court phone number, signaling that they want to find services or accommodation. The court summons might have this phone number and keyword on it, for litigants to follow.
The message flow is interactive, allowing the litigant to choose what kind of information or connections they would like.
The court sets up the interactive menu of options and provides phone numbers, hours, and other details about how to get legal aid, assistance, self-help, court directions, and disability or language accommodations.
Lessons Learned from the Eviction Prevention Learning Lab cohort
As eviction rates go back up following the court shutdowns and emergency moratoria during the pandemic, communities are struggling with the question: how can we prevent evictions?
How can we help people stay in their homes, avoid lawsuits to force them out of their houses or pay extra fees, and have a scarlet ‘E’ on their credit report for years to come? And how can we help mom-and-pop landlords who are trying to avoid a costly lawsuit and turning a unit over to find a new renter?
The past several years have seen a tide of new programs, policies, and technology initiatives all aiming to prevent evictions in different ways. What are all of these initiatives, and how can we expand them to help more communities across the US?
Our team at Stanford Legal Design Lab and the National League of Cities runs the Eviction Prevention Learning Lab (EPLL), which has established a strong, local base of knowledge about how to prevent evictions, and how to start up and scale successful new programs and policies.
The Eviction Prevention Learning Lab, a peer-to-peer network of local city leaders, has just concluded our cohort. This program engaged teams from 30 municipalities in 22 different states, totaling roughly 400 individual participants. The EPLL cohort operated from early 2021 through autumn 2022 and uncovered many promising practices around how evictions can be prevented, — as well as barriers that stand in the way of local leaders looking to move the needle on housing stability.
After working closely with the city leaders over the past 18 months, our organizing team at Stanford Legal Design Lab and NLC have synthesized the cohort’s progress, insights, and next steps in this essay. These insights & patterns from the 30 cities in the EPLL can help other regions’ government agencies, courts, nonprofits, and community leaders to use in their eviction prevention work.
Why have an eviction prevention cohort?
Communities across the country are struggling with a growing eviction crisis, in which tenants are at risk of lawsuits, forced moves, and other strategies to displace them from their rental homes. Evictions lead to housing instability and homelessness, as well as collateral consequences for people’s credit reports, education, employment, health, and finances.
So what are ways to prevent evictions? In the past, local leaders have had to struggle with this question on their own. Eviction laws and housing market dynamics are often highly local. Different cities and states have different rules, protections, policies, and market forces. This fragmented landscape makes it hard to address the crisis. Local leaders often have to take the lead in navigating their local stakeholder groups, legislation, court rules, and funding relationships to find solutions.
The EPLL helped local leaders know what programs and policies are possible, what’s been tried in other similar regions, and how they can deploy these new initiatives successfully. Throughout the 18 months, EPLL cohort members learned what is happening throughout the country to deal with the eviction crisis, through presentations, interactive meetings, design workshops, and technical assistance engagements. They were trained in new data and communication skills, they heard detailed case studies about how new services or policies roll out, and they built relationships with their counterparts in other regions. All of these webinars, meetings, and share-outs have led to a strong national network that can adapt and scale the most promising practices to address evictions. The EPLL participants have used the cohort to create new innovative solutions that work for their local dynamics.
What have the past 18 months of eviction prevention been like?
At the closing meetings of the EPLL, our organizing team asked city leaders about what they have accomplished since the start of 2021. Here are some of the big accomplishments they highlighted:
Emergency rental assistance distribution to keep people in their homes
The biggest accomplishment most leaders shared from the past two years was the huge volume of rental assistance used to prevent evictions. Significant amounts of emergency rental assistance were successfully distributed to tenants and landlords at risk.
For example, $304 million dollars were distributed to people in need in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, it was $52 million. Local leaders created completely new emergency rental assistance programs during the pandemic and successfully used ERA money to keep people in their homes and resolve landlord-tenant disputes.
Court partnerships, rule changes, and programs.
Many EPLL leaders were able to bring city agency, nonprofit, and court leadership together to create new court-based interventions. These are key to preventing evictions by getting support, mediation, and financial assistance to tenants and landlords struggling through a conflict. Some of the innovations included new diversion programs to turn lawsuits into settlement agreements, changes to courtroom setups that connect litigants with more holistic services and guidance, outreach strategies to encourage participation, and co-located services to help litigants get financial and housing navigation.
Some courts even changed their rules about how eviction cases proceed, with more judicial management, mediation sessions, integrations with ERA programs, and support for people without lawyers. These court pilots are now being formalized and spread through initiatives like the National Center for State Courts’ Eviction Diversion Initiative.
Innovative, equity-focused outreach efforts
The EPLL members, with guidance and assistance from our NLC and Stanford team, created new ways to connect tenants and landlords with eviction prevention help. This included new on-the-ground community networks and in-person assistance. City leaders and nonprofits in places like Louisville and Chattanooga have brought services to people in their neighborhoods, with door-knocking campaigns, pop-up offices, and on-site training. They built these community-based outreach efforts in order to reach people with strong word of mouth, particularly in areas where there was a high risk of eviction.
In addition to community-based outreach, the EPLL members also developed strong digital and visual outreach as well. They created (and shared) new style sheets, social media campaigns, landlord-tenant websites, text message lines, and intake partnerships with other social service groups. These outreach materials made use of many different modes and leveraged the power of the Internet to reach different audiences. These strategic outreach efforts helped increase awareness about new programs like ERA and eviction diversion programs and encouraged equitable participation in them.
The establishment of strategic coalitions and networks
EPLL cohort members, including city teams in Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Milwaukee, highlighted this theme as a key priority to deploying any new individual initiative. To really prevent evictions, city leaders discovered that it was necessary to build a local strategy group that spanned different agencies, nonprofits, courts, legal aid, and community groups.
EPLL city leaders coached each other on how to build an effective local network. One key step was aligning courts, city government, legal aid, nonprofits, and foundations around the notion of ‘eviction prevention’ as a common goal, which could help them understand how they could collaborate in new ways. Often this meant having regular meetings, having staff members at each others’ locations, finding ways to share data, and teaching each other about their own institutions. This was particularly helpful in setting up new ERA programs and then also winding them down. These ongoing strategic networks can help the leaders and communities respond to the opportunities and hurdles that emerge.
The importance of national networks
The EPLL helped city leaders to find inspiration, guidance, data, and other evidence that could support their own local work. At the EPLL sessions and in their peer-to-peer meetings, these cross-jurisdiction relationships bloomed in order to help city leaders get evidence, blueprints, strategies, and outreach templates that could help replicate and scale successful efforts. These national networks also provide an undercurrent of support to professionals who often are stressed and over-committed. Because they could find peers dealing with similar challenges in other locations, the EPLL relationships ended up being a place for leaders to recharge.
What’s next for eviction prevention?
Now regional leaders are turning to the next phase of eviction prevention work. When we asked them what their current goals and challenges are, here is the agenda they laid out for the next several years:
Moving to longer-term planning for sustainable innovation
Beyond local programs and short-term mandates, city leaders want to use what they learned during the short-term planning of the emergency to design permanent eviction programs, that also fit into the bigger picture at the state and national levels.
Shift to mediation and problem resolution
Now that there is less money to support ERA programs, local coalitions are exploring how to revise their prevention programs — especially court diversion programs. Many are focusing on community mediators, preventative outreach in high-risk neighborhoods, and mandatory pre-filing diversion programs to help landlords and tenants resolve problems without going through an eviction.
State government involvement
City leaders have also discovered the limits of what they can do at the local level to stop evictions. More are now exploring what they might be able to do in partnership with governors, state legislatures, and other statewide agencies. In some cases, this might be about statewide programs.
In other places, it’s legislative changes or funding. For example, some cities are trying to deal with statewide laws that prohibit eviction record sealing. Other leaders are cautious about proposing reforms to statewide landlord-tenant laws, for fear that once the law is open for changes, there might end up being changes that inhibit eviction prevention.
Strengthening local coalitions
Now that some agencies are moving away from eviction prevention as a core priority, leaders are working on how to keep their pandemic-era coalitions intact and stronger. Many cities are exploring more service co-location, referral networks, and funding plans. Some coalitions are considering breaking into different themes or seeking out common funding in order to keep the coalition strong.
Special attention to court involvement & judge leadership
A particular concern is court and judge involvement in these coalitions. Many cities have had difficulty getting local judges and court executives to collaborate on eviction diversion.
In response, they are creating data to show court leaders the impact of current court practices on the community’s housing and homelessness situation. They are also spotlighting how courts can better administer the justice system when they partner with other agencies on eviction diversion programs, resource networks, record sealing, and other efforts.
Judges can play a role in setting better court rules, scheduling, and courtroom setup that allow more participation in court, and more services to get a better outcome for both tenants and landlords.
Infrastructure around common models and data efforts
Groups are also thinking about regional and national coordination efforts that can spread best practices more efficiently and establish more knowledge about the eviction system. Groups are working on national data standardization and sharing efforts, like those led by New America. Some groups, including a coalition in Philadelphia and states in the Justice For All program, are considering how to make standardized, well-designed legal documents like court forms, eviction summons, settlement agreements, and leases, that improve prevention efforts. Some city teams are considering investing in broader public awareness of housing rights and equity, so that more people see how these interconnected programs around rental assistance, court diversion, mediation, affordable housing, and homelessness prevention all work together.
Working Towards Sustainable Eviction Prevention
The past two years have been a flurry of eviction prevention innovation, with new initiatives like emergency rental assistance, court diversion efforts, and community justice navigators starting up in regions across the US. But will these fledgling new initiatives take root, to become permanent, growing eviction prevention efforts?
Much of that will depend on what happens in the next year. Local leaders, as well as our NLC and Stanford Legal Design Lab, will continue to work on innovative, coordinated new efforts to help prevent evictions and all of the harm they cause to families and communities.
More Resources
Explore pilots and data about eviction prevention at our site Eviction Innovation.
Find practical guides in the Emergency Rental Assistance Toolkit for more effective outreach, program design, partnerships, and more.
Read more about the Eviction Prevention Learning Lab here.
Margaret Hagan, Dec 1, 2022
Reflecting back on all of our legal design work over the past 10 years, I’ve spotted a common pattern happening:
Having observed many of these policy → program journeys — and how hard it is to get public awareness, uptake, and engagement with new policies — there is one solution that should be baked into the earlier phases, as groups are proposing policies:
Community Justice Navigators are an essential part to making justice reforms impactful.
If every new ‘justice reform’ policy came with a mandate & funding for community justice navigators, this could be a big step towards making the policy have the impact it is intended to.
Community justice navigators can be in the neighborhoods and community groups, to alert the public about this new policy & programming. They can help people understand what the opportunity is, and why it’s trustworthy and valuable. Navigators can:
A Community Justice Navigator doesn’t have to play all of these roles — but even playing a few of them can help increase access to justice. A navigator can increase a person’s legal capability — improving their knowledge, strategy, and confidence.
A Navigator can also help policy-makers and service providers, by getting their new rules and programs crucial public exposure, doing the ‘customer service’ work of helping people navigate this new system, and encouraging the person to participate in a timely, well-prepared way.
Any new justice reform policy or program is likely going to struggle with public awareness, uptake, and navigation. So why doesn’t every new policy effort come baked in with a Community Justice Navigator program?
For all the effort that goes into getting new legislation or programs launched, the real goal is to impact people’s lives for the better. We want people to know about this new policy, be able to use it, and have improved life outcomes because of it. To make an impact, we need to invest in & train more Community Justice Navigators, to reach the public & help them use new programs that are meant to help them.
Read more about Justice Navigator programs for examples:
Margaret Hagan, Aug 16, 2022
Building a network that’s researching, designing, and evaluating what works to increase access to justice
Earlier this summer I was lucky to spend a Saturday in conversation with Professor Monica Palmirani & her research group CIRSFID at the University of Bologna.
It was a pleasant afternoon talking about projects & giving feedback on early-stage initiatives. Especially because of COVID, it has been hard to build up international (or even inter-university) connections about what our different legal labs and research groups are working on.
It turns out that there was a surprising amount of overlap between our work at Stanford Legal Design Lab and the CIRSFID group in Bologna.
Both of our groups are focused on an overarching theme:
How do we empower more people to participate in the government systems meant to benefit and protect them? In particular, how do we increase people’s ability to understand, use, and participate in the legal system to resolve housing & finance problems?
For us at Stanford Legal Design Lab, we have been very focused on people’s participation in the United States’ state court and legal aid systems. For people facing life problems around housing, debt, employment, and other situations — can we increase their participation in this legal help system to resolve the problem and move forward with their life?
Parallels in A2J innovation from California to Italy
Professor Palmirani’s group just launched a project with very similar themes, in another jurisdiction’s context. They have launched a 5-year research project on digital participation in government. This focus aligns with ours at the Legal Design Lab — and it turns out our past projects have as well.
Building data standards for justice systems
The Bologna group has already established infrastructure around legislation and NLP, through their data standards of Akoma Ntoso & Legal Document ML to capture legislation in standardized notation.
This parallels our Stanford’s group focus on data standards:
It turns out that in our different regional contexts, both of our research groups have made data standards infrastructure projects a central part of our work. These standards project lay the ground for more groups to develop new solutions & intelligent applications.
That said, there’s another — less technical, more design — theme that we also have both aligned on in Bologna & California.
Legal Design in the Courts for User Empowerment
Professor Palmirani’s group in Bologna has turned to legal design as another theme for innovation and research. Their group has partnered with judges in Sicily, to do user research, create new designs, and evaluate them. The challenge they’re tackling through legal design is this:
This project in Bologna/Siciliy parallels our Stanford projects in which we’ve been working with courts and city governments on rental relief, eviction diversion initiatives, and moratoria. Like in the Italian example, there also have been recent roll-outs of new laws, assistance programs, and court policies. We have been working on the outreach and service design, with similar goals to our European counterparts.
The Bologna group has created several design interventions that they are now going to evaluate in the Sicily context. They have created a visual explainer book, along with online videos, that onboard people to their options to deal with debt. The goals of the explainers are as follows:
The Design Patterns & Strategies for Legal Empowerment
Their group of lawyers and designers have created visual guides that they will test.
The guides were created with many visual and messaging strategies, meant to increase engagement, motivation, and action:
This Justice Innovation Work Can Be Networked
This effort in Sicily has been amazing to watch. The Bologna group will have more to report about the effectiveness of their Engage -> Motivate -> Act theory of change.
In the meantime, there is much to learn for other folks (myself included) who are working on the research & design of new justice system interventions, meant for legal empowerment. Like the Bologna group, my Lab has also been busy working on new guides, websites, outreach fliers, and maps to help institutions better engage & empower the public. When I talked with Professor Palmirani and her team, I realized that we had been working in a parallel way but had much to learn from each other.
In particular, there is an opportunity for the law school labs, court innovation groups, legal tech entrepreneurs, and others focused on ‘justice innovation’ to be creating some standard ways of working. These would not be hard-and-fast data standards. Rather it would be a collection of best practices, strategies, and instruments that we can share.
In particular, we could be spreading & scaling our ways of working, including:
I’m excited to build more of these ‘design standards’ for our group in Stanford and to spread and edit them while we collaborate with groups like Professor Palmirani’s group in Italy, and other labs and research teams around the world.
Please feel free to share your own best practices on developing & evaluating ‘justice interventions’ in the comments!
Margaret Hagan, Jun 29, 2022
(Even if we should be moving away from forms altogether…)
I am thinking a lot about forms these days! At the Stanford Filing Fairness Project, our team is working on a near future in which PDF forms no longer are key to people’s access to the court system. In that vision, it’s all about moving from populating PDFs to gathering data fields and sending them straight from a user-friendly website to the court’s case management system. No PDF forms needed!
But we still live in a justice system full of PDF forms. Even when software exists to help people fill in forms, through logic trees and document assembly programs, still it’s all going through PDFs.
So… if we still have to live in a world of PDF forms, let’s make sure that this world is as accessible & empowering to as many people as possible. We still need to care about the design of PDF forms.
The Basics of Good Court Form Design
This morning I had the privilege to kick off the National Center for State Courts summertime webinar series: Forms Camp. Over 750 attendees showed up to learn how to design better court forms. Usually, I think of court form design as a super-specialized, design geek kind of topic. But it turns out that a lot of people are unhappy with their current form design, and want to make them better.
So what should you to design better forms? I had 3 main areas for work:
1. Shifting from Institution-Centered Forms to People-Centered Forms
To really design a better court form, we need to shift from an institutional perspective to a user’s perspective. In particular, we really need to think of the end-user, the litigant who has a PDF or a digital pdf in front of them, is trying to deal with some kind of civil justice problem, and now has to use this form document to get their stories and choices into the court.
This user point of view is different than the institutional one — which is usually a ‘forms committee’ point of view. There the POV is about trying to put as many of the legal requirements in a PDF document, covering all possible use cases, and getting this document passed through a series of judicial committees and approval structures as quickly as possible.
Once we start looking at the court form from the user’s POV, we can see how important the humble form is to big lofty issues of access to justice, procedural fairness, and social policy. We also can set some better metrics & indicators by which to measure whether a form is successful or not.
Moving to People-Centered Measures of Forms
At the highest level, a successful form will increase a person’s access to justice. It will increase the litigant’s procedural justice & substantive justice.
It will make a person feel that the court process is transparent, fair, and trustworthy. (That’s procedural justice).
It will let them share their info, perspective, & experiences so that the judge can make a fair decision, applying the law to the situation in a just way. (That’s the substantive justice).
So how do we get to a form that increases access to justice?
At the intermediate level, a successful form will be useful, usable, and engaging to litigants. A litigant should be able to find & use iteasily. They would find it useful,to get their key info across & prepare for court. And it would engagethem, so they want to spend time & resources filling it in. These are all core principles of user-centered design in all realms — applied here to the specific court form scenario.
If we are going to define a court form’s key performance indicators (or, KPIs for acronym fans), we should make a user-centered KPI list. We put litigants first — since the justice system is meant to serve the public. We also include court staff and leadership as secondary users as well, since we know that they are users of forms, too. To make a good form, we need to track indicators for both litigants & staff.
Key Form Success Indicators
Here is how courts can track a form’s performance & aim for improvements:
People-Centered Indicators
Staff-Centered Indicators
Setting up these metrics and indicators is key to getting the first part of form design right. We need to know what we’re aiming to achieve. Once we have user-centered metrics and indicators in place, we make sure all our design and legal work are oriented in the right direction.
2. Follow Visual & Court Form Design Principles
So, then how do we make it more likely that litigants will engage with these forms, use them easily & correctly, and find value in filling them out? That’s where design principles come in.
I presented two sets of guiding principles for court form designers to follow. The first principles are general graphic or visual design principles, that have been honed over the years in various (non-legal) fields. The second principles are court-form-specific principles that I distilled from the past decade of working on legal design at Stanford.
General Visual Design Rules
How do you lay out a paper-based (or digital PDF) form in the most user-friendly way? Here is a short run down of useful visual design principles:
Key design principles that court form designers can use
If you want to get more into very detailed communication design choices (like font, color, and accessibility) there are more resources on general visual design rules here:
Court Form Design: the key components of a form
These general principles are great, but they can be hard to translate to the specific world of court forms. We need to dive into the specifics of the court form’s components — and people’s experiences of a form.
Court forms usually contain this shortlist of components. These are the ‘materials’ we can use in our design. We can also track — does the form have all these key things, does it get the hierarchy right, and does it treat them consistently?
Court Form Design: How litigants experience a form
People don’t magically see a form, get excited, and spend the next two hours completing it before they walk it over to the court clerk’s office. Their experience is usually much more complicated and stressful.
We need to see the court form not as a static document, but as an experience. Understanding people’s experience of a form helps us figure out specific principles that can help increase engagement, usability, and usefulness.
From our user testing and observation sessions at the Legal Design Lab, we’ve found trends in how litigants use forms — especially when they are self-represented.
This is where we come back to the big goal of access to justice. Court forms could be an essential gateway to participating in the justice system. But they are hard! They ask for complex, high-stakes information. And people are often in a high-stress situation, afraid of getting things wrong, and with a lot of other things to do in their life. So if a court form is badly designed, it can disengage users, and shut down their access to justice.
Key Court Form Design Principles
So with that background, I propose a handful of key principles for good court form design.
3. Running a Design Process on Your Court Forms
Great! Now we have user-centered metrics to aim for, we’re aiming at more engagement, usability, and usefulness, and we know some principles about how to do this. Let’s think even more concretely. How do we get courts, judicial councils, and forms committees to start improving the design of their court forms? How do we get more people-centered shifts, and more use of key design principles?
Kick off a Redesign by doing a User-Centered Design Review
If you’re inside the court, you can start a design process. I often like to do it in a series of workshops — beginning with design review sessions, involving many different stakeholders and especially court users.
You can lay out existing court forms on a board or a digital whiteboard, and then start going through what works or doesn’t. You can mark it up with post-its, or pen, or even cut it up and reorganize it.
We did this using a Miro board at today’s Form Camp session. We start a design review by beginning with a specific user’s POV. Today, we began with this user scenario:
A tenant in California has just been sued for eviction.
They’ve searched online & found a pdf of this form at the California courts’ webpage. https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/ud105.pdf
How can we make it usable, useful, and engaging to this litigant?
So we situated our forms discussion in the user’s journey. They’ve come from a Google search, then to a court website, then to a digital pdf. Let’s imagine we are this tenant — and look at the pdf to see what we could improve.
I screenshot the 5 pages of the California unlawful detainer answer response. This is the document that a tenant would have to fill out, in order to defend themselves against an eviction lawsuit. I laid out the 5 pages on the digital whiteboard, and then asked my team to answer a series of questions about how well the form lived up to the key design principles. I took notes with post-its as they gave feedback.
I prepared a series of specific questions, to get the stakeholders to critique the current design based on the court form and visual design principles.
User Journey Review of a court form
If a person sat down with this form, could they navigate it?
Area 1: Hierarchy Review of a court form
Do you have a clear hierarchy of information & tasks?
Your strategic ranking: Have you reviewed everything you want to convey & get from the user? What is most important? What is the middle? What is the least important for the user?
Giving the right treatment: For the most important things, have you put them:
Strong headings: Have you put strong, clear headings for the distinct ‘zones’?
Area 2: Standardized Layout Review of your court form
Do you have standard ways you’re laying out groups of info?
Are things consistently in the same place on the page, in the same font/sizing/alignment:
Are they grouped in clear & distinct zones for a user to navigate?
Area 3: Legibility & Capability-building review
Are the zones, text, and layout all accessible & enhancing legal capability — instead of overwhelming the person?
These different sets of questions can make sure the stakeholders are doing a critique based on the user’s POV and design principles derived from past best practices. If you don’t use these questions, it’s easy to start shifting back to an institutional-centered POV.
After design review workshops, the team can then move onto other kinds of workshops to generate prototypes, test them, and decide on final versions of forms.
What kinds of form design workshops can you run in your court?
Better Court Form Design will be a continual process
It would be great if I could publish a template for all court forms to follow. It might have hard rules about maximum page length, the ideal font size, and the perfect grid layout. Perhaps these patterns will emerge in the coming years, as we do more testing of form designs with a wide range of users.
But for now, the best way to make user-friendly court forms is to have a continual process of reviewing current forms with community members, drawing on established design principles, testing any new prototype with litigants and court staff, and using our people-centered indicators as the metrics to determine if a court form should be released to the public.
In any court form design, there will be lots of trade-offs. How many details, claims, defenses, and rights can we let a person know about — before we exhaust them to the point of disengagement? How much generous white space can we give a person, until the form becomes so lengthy that it turns them off?
That’s why a multi-stakeholder process, still rooted in the litigant’s (and staff members’) points of view is necessary to decide what works best in making these trade-offs. Ideally, more courts will be engaging in this design work, gathering even more principles and best practices, and leading towards more standardization of the best form designs.
That said — perhaps this whole conversation will be moot soon, if we move towards more interactive form-filling websites, with no more PDFs at all. We’ll then move on to the best design of software interfaces. There will be slightly different principles in play — but our metrics and goals should still be the same.
We want more people to be able to protect their rights in court and do so with a sense of confidence, capability, and dignity. Good court forms are fundamental to good access to justice. As more courts embrace user-centered design, we can start moving to this better future.
Margaret Hagan, Jan 13, 2022
We have been talking and working on the importance of the justice system’s user experience — as have many others in other public interest sectors.
We have been talking and working on the importance of the justice system’s user experience — as have many others in other public interest sectors.
These civic services should be usable, useful, and engaging. It should be easy for all different types of people to find their options for courts, benefits, taxes, government documents, and other key government tasks. The processes should be as simple as possible, with the fewest time and money burdens, and with an emphasis on a supportive, dignified experience.
Now we are seeing these goals become legal mandates.
The White House issued an Executive Order in December 2021 setting out explicit rules about good design of federal government services. It sets out human-centered design as an official obligation for federal agencies.
Here’s a quote of their policy intent with this order:
“ The Federal Government must design and deliver services in a manner that people of all abilities can navigate. We must use technology to modernize Government and implement services that are simple to use, accessible, equitable, protective, transparent, and responsive for all people of the United States.”
It also uses the UX-oriented concept of administrative burdens to set out metrics. The order requires that these agencies be measuring the quality of the design and user experience.
“It is the policy of the United States that, in a Government of the people, by the people, and for the people, improving service delivery and customer experience should be fundamental priorities. The Government’s performance must be measured empirically and by on-the-ground results for the people of the United States, especially for their experiences with services delivered.”
The Order sets out staffing, agenda-setting, and other required actions to make these policy goals real. In some in cases, the Order calls out specific websites, services, and forms/applications that need good civic design overhauls. It mandates that government staff centralize and simplify processes, and then create more user-friendly platforms and tools so that people can find and use them.
One other possible legal design policy is happening in New York City. (Hat tip to a colleague at the Racial Justice office of the city for alerting me to this).
The NYC Racial Justice Commission has some Ballot Proposals for 2022 — one of which (Proposal 2) would establish a Racial Equity Office in the City. Part of this office would include a mandate for good civic design, language access design, and overall human-centered service design.
These proposals are linking racial equity with good design. It’s baking in key design principles of empathetic, non-paternalistic respect for community members — and a commitment to inclusion through better government design. If passed, this Citywide Access Design project would be a leader in ensuring that diverse community members can access the government services they need.
Do you have other examples of government agencies recognizing the importance of good legal and civic design? And how it was established as a law, rule, or policy? Please share!
More legal aid and court groups are excited to use text message strategies to reach people facing lawsuits. Texting may help encourage participation, increase uptake of free services, and empower people to avoid defaults & other bad legal outcomes.
But the problem many of them face is how to legally & ethically reach out to members of the public through text. If they don’t already have a relationship with a person, can they initiate a texting relationship with them?
For example, if a legal aid group sees that a person has been sued for eviction in a local county court, can they proactively send them a text message (especially if they have the person’s phone number from the court docket info or from a phone-lookup service)?
The Legal Services Corporation recently published an Advisory Opinion that walks through guidance to this question, to show legal aid groups how they can do this proactive text message outreach on a topic like eviction services — and still be in compliance with the law. They also have a Program Letter that explains how legal aid groups can do proactive texting without violating federal anti-spam laws.
See this 2020 Advisory opinion on proactive text message outreach from the LSC to legal aid groups.
Also see this 2022 Program Letter from the LSC that walks through explicitly how proactive text message out reach can be done, in compliance with federal laws. Our Lab had written to the LSC to ask this question, because we had many legal aid colleagues who were thinking about adopting a text message reminder strategy & we wanted to make sure that the community knew how to do this in compliance with laws against spam or other violations.
Margaret Hagan, Sep 14, 2021
If you are sued by your landlord to evict you from your home, how would you like to find out?
The papers you get from the court — the Summons to the eviction trial, and the Complaint from your landlord about why they’re suing from you — most often are dense, legalistic documents.
These pieces of paper can set the tone for the eviction legal process. And they can communicate: is the court for you? If you show up to the eviction trial, are you going to be able to protect yourself, and get your voice heard? Or is this going to be so intimidating & confusing that it’s not even worth it to show up?
And even more fundamentally: can you even understand these documents? Is it clear that:
Our Legal Design Lab has collaborated with the Hamilton County Municipal Court in Ohio to reimagine how people
We took the current court eviction summons and did a series of multi-stakeholder workshops to reimagine its look, feel, and content to make it more user-centered. We created and refined a new summons, and have been piloting it in the court to see if we can increase tenants’ participation in the court process and use of legal services.
Here is how the traditional court summons looks like, and what we found in our workshops that needed to be fixed.
We then had brainstorming and prototyping workshops in Cincinnati to create a new eviction summons design. We had plain language and visual design principles front of mind. And we also had tenants, landlords, advocates, and court officials contribute their preferences (as well as legal and statutory requirements).
Here is our finalized new summons design.
We will have study results about whether the new summons resulted in more people attending their hearing & using legal aid services. Preliminary results indicate that the new summons did increase the participation rate/decrease the default rate (though COVID has been a confounder!).
We do have some design principles for user-centered court documents, notifications, and summons that other groups can use.
Each new design should be driven by local stakeholders & their needs. But these principles can help your court or legal design team create court documents that people will be more likely to read — and take action with.
A design research report from Stanford’s Justice By Design: Eviction class in Winter 2022
This report is by the class team Trevor Byrne, Emma Dolan, Jordan Payne, Alexandra Reeves, Amy Zhai — along with the teaching team Nora Al Haider, and Margaret Hagan.
As the eviction crisis spreads throughout the United States, there is an access to justice paradox that has emerged.
More and more groups — legal aid, court self-help centers, city governments, emergency rent programs, and legal help websites — are trying to get help out to tenants who are at risk of eviction. These groups have legal guidance, rental assistance, and mediation resources to help tenants pay back their rent, make agreements with their landlords, or fight back against eviction in court.
But there’s a disconnect. Many tenants never reach out for help. They don’t call these groups, visit their offices, or go to their websites. Or they may start out to seek help, but then fall off during the process. They cannot ‘complete their justice journey’. They’re not able to assert their rights, use free services, or protect themselves from a forced move.
So, what are the barriers that are stopping renters from seeking or using legal help & other services, when they are at risk of forced displacement from their homes — and all the collateral consequences that come with an eviction?
That was the driving question of our Winter 2022 Stanford Law School class, Justice By Design: Eviction. We have taught versions of this class throughout the past few years as a ‘policy lab’ class at SLS. This time we partnered again with the NAACP as our policy lab partner, because they also are interested in engaging more tenants with legal and community help when they’re at risk of forced displacement or eviction.
In this Winter 2022 class, our focus was talking with tenants who had eviction experiences. From their stories, through deep, qualitative interviews, our goal was to identify these barriers to seeking help, as well as to spot opportunities for more effective outreach and interventions to help tenants at risk.
This report summarizes what we heard from our tenant interviews, as well as the interventions and strategies the class identified to encourage more tenants to increase their ability to defend themselves, use services, and avoided the harmful consequences of an eviction.
How our class did this user research
Our class team had students from all over Stanford, who were interested in learning more about eviction, housing policy, public interest technology, and justice system reform. Justice By Design: Eviction was a 9-week class, listed in the Law School, but open to undergraduates and graduates from across the university.
After introductory weeks that taught the students about the basics of the eviction crisis and how housing courts work, then our teaching team prepared the students for qualitative interviews with renters who had experiences with eviction. This included prep on ethical design work and engagement with the community, as well as a primer on the past eviction prevention work done in our class & Legal Design Lab.
Our teaching team had recruited renters through social media ads that asked, “Do you have experience with eviction? Do you want to speak to our university team about your experiences and ideas?” We also offered Amazon gift cards in compensation for being interviewed.
The students, in pairs or teams of 3, interviewed 16 tenants, navigators, and landlords across the country. The goal of the interviews was to learn from the tenants’ experiences, identify their barriers to participating in the justice system, and hear their ideas. We asked general questions about their experiences with eviction, their experiences with seeking out help, and their ideas for change.
After conducting the interviews, then the student teams synthesized interviews by creating personas, user journeys, and visual representations of salient moments gleaned from the interviews. They also analyzed the various stories and proposals to identify commonalities that point to pervasive issues and that suggest potential reforms.
Big Takeaways on Tenant Barriers & Needs in Eviction Prevention
When we talk about Access to Justice in evictions for tenants, often the primary recommendation is to provide a Right to Counsel — a guaranteed free lawyer for anyone who reaches out for help with an eviction lawsuit. What we found, though, is that the A2J problem and needs are more complicated than that.
In the interviews, we heard repeatedly from renters:
Key Problems with the eviction system, from the interviews
The students went through the experiences of the interviewed tenants, to spot where the system is breaking down. When did people not know about their rights as a tenant? When were they not able to participate effectively in the justice system? When were they feeling stressed, fearful, and desperate? When were they being harmed because they didn’t know about help — or they didn’t feel they could access it?
We identified 7 common problem areas that tenants were dealing with. These all constitute barriers to finding and accessing help, that could help the tenant on their ‘justice journey’ to getting procedural and substantive justice in their housing problem. Some of these barriers are psychological perceptions or situations; others are structural problems with how the justice system, legal services, and financial services are set up. Many of them are a mixture of both — a barrier that combines the burdens of the person’s individual situation that make it hard for them to seek out help, along with institutional features or legacies that make the system difficult to access.
We have more details and example tenant stories for each of these 7 problem areas. These all include anonymized details from the interviews we conducted with tenants across the US.
Problem 1: Renters caught in Informal Evictions — where no service groups are connecting with them
Many tenants described falling behind on rent and feeling that they had to move out, even before they had been served with any formal eviction documents. Landlords often don’t follow proper notice procedures for eviction, telling their tenants to pay what they owe or start planning to move out. Considering a pervasive fear of the legal system, as discussed below, it is difficult to imagine tenants being empowered to hold their landlords accountable for breaking the law.
Especially for tenants behind on rent, many lack a feeling of agency to look for resources. They assume that because they are behind on rent, they will not have any recourse to resist displacement.
The fact that many evictions occur informally presents unique challenges for policy implementation. Many eviction reforms are centered on the court process. The assumption baked into these programs is that services should be unlocked once a landlord goes to court and files an action against a tenant.
But legal and court reforms will not affect the experiences of those evicted extralegally. The landlord doesn’t go to the court, there is no official record of the possible eviction, and thus the services &the policies are never triggered. The tenant (and the landlord) don’t know that these financial, legal, and mediation services even exist.
These tenants’ experiences highlight the need for empowering interventions that occur before the eviction experience. Tenants (and landlords) need to know of their rights and resources before a housing scare occurs. Service groups need to find ways to connect with people who are not in the official court records. Any intervention that does not reach clients pre-eviction may be too late.
John’s Story: Informal Eviction even in a city full of resources
John (we have changed his name) was informally evicted from his home in San Francisco. Due to local tenant protections, John very likely could have received legal aid — if he knew where to look. But John was evicted informally; he was told to vacate by his landlord, without being provided any proper legal notice.
John was recovering from injuries he sustained during an accident, so he did not feel that he had the ability to look for any financial or legal resources. Unable to make up the rent he owed, John and his family had to move out. They were able to live temporarily with friends and family until they found a new place to live.
John’s story is a prime example of how even when robust legal or financial resources exist, these resources provide no recourse to informally evicted tenants who lack awareness of their options. Ensuring that tenants are informed of their rights and resources before a crisis occurs is critical.
Problem 2: Eviction Notices are Complex & Inaccessible
Receiving a Notice to Quit or an eviction summons could be a potential point of intervention. These notices ideally would tell tenants:
Formal eviction notices are far from this ideal. To most tenants, they appear to be warnings that they need to leave, rather than indicators that they have options as part of an ongoing process.
Notices tend to be written in confusing English, and are often not served in foreign languages.
Some states have attempted to simplify eviction notices. In Massachusetts, for example, an eviction summons gives the tenant a court date. Getting to court can be difficult, but being given a date and location seems easier to comply with than the requirement of making an official legal filing.
Greater Boston Legal Services has a free online service that prompts tenants with questions to answer in plain English, then creates a form that tenants can use in Housing Court to help them defend themselves. Instead of forcing people to file an official Answer, giving tenants the option to fill out an online form where they can explain their situation could be much more tenant-friendly.
The Problem of Bureaucratized Landlord-Tenant Communications
We also learned that the landlord-tenant relationship is becoming increasingly bureaucratized. Many tenants live not under mom-and-pop landlords, but rather under large, impersonal property management companies. These companies can churn out Notices to Quit summarily after tenants fall behind on rent — even if they fall behind for just a few days. Tenants feel slighted by this impersonal process; they are asked to vacate without anyone checking in on them or trying to work things out informally.
Property management companies provide an interesting wrinkle in how we think about policy implementation. Because their systems are bureaucratized (and may be less personally antagonistic toward non-paying tenants), it may be simpler for them to implement positive changes — like attaching an NAACP Navigator flier whenever they serve a Notice to Quit.
Linda’s Story: How a Notice Confuses rather than Empowers
Linda works as a case manager for people affected by COVID, and her work includes assisting people through eviction scares. She is completely knowledgeable of all the resources available to tenants in her home state of Colorado. Because she lives under an impersonal property management company, she received a Notice to Quit after falling behind on rent for three days.
Having lived in her home for some time without any issues, Linda was shocked and offended that the company would try to kick her out after being behind for just three days. And even though she knows the law, she reported that her ability to comprehend her rights was compromised when she received her notice — she started to second-guess her own knowledge.
Linda acknowledges that if she did not have her specialized background knowledge, the notice would likely have prompted her to leave.
Problem 3: Fear of court and court inaccessibility
Most tenants we interviewed never really pictured their eviction scare as a legal issue. For most who sought recourse, their emphasis was on finding enough money to pay. Some tenants expressed uncertainty about what, if any, legal resources were available to them. Certain tenants expressed that they did not qualify for legal aid, yet they could not independently afford legal assistance.
Beyond the problem of access to legal advice, many tenants expressed broad skepticism about participating in court. There is a shared understanding that court is a protracted, exhausting endeavor. Having to balance that experience with a family, a job, and other obligations is challenging and sometimes impossible. For some, going to court does not feel worth the risk of losing time for their other commitments, potentially having the black mark of a formal eviction on their record, exposing their children to a courthouse, or going against their landlord — who they identify as having more power within the system.
Any interventions that focus on the legal process of eviction must consider the fact that many tenants are evicted informally, and that even tenants with the opportunity to go to court choose to avoid the process of legal resistance. If interventions are designed to make court more tenant-friendly and more feasible to navigate, these changes need to be communicated to tenants to change a widespread negative perception of the legal system.
Linda’s Story: Going to Court Isn’t a Viable Option
As discussed above, Linda works with people being evicted, so she is very aware of tenant resources and legal rights. When she faced her own eviction scare, however, she did not see the court as a viable option, and she instead opted for finding financial assistance.
Certainly, going to court could yield a positive result, but the prospect of being formally evicted and having that on her permanent record was too risky. The fact that even someone as knowledgeable as Linda was scared of the courts should be highly-telling to policy-makers.
Problem 4: Fear of “fighting,” desire for help
Related to the fear of court, tenants generally had overall apprehension at the thought of “fighting for their rights” or resisting. Due to the high stress of eviction, as well as the numerous obligations many tenants have to balance, the notion of resisting doesn’t always seem feasible or attractive. Most tenants focused not on resisting, but rather on getting some assistance and moving on with their lives.
Many eviction prevention policies place a heavy emphasis on lawyering, and encouraging tenants to resist through the various legal defenses they can raise. But to better meet tenants’ needs and desires, non-legal help (like the Navigators) may be a preferable intervention. Several tenants sought out rental assistance, but not legal assistance, suggesting that tenants may disfavor interventions that are seen as overly combative. There was also a widespread consensus that rental assistance was more accessible than legal services.
The tenants we spoke with seem to disfavor legal interventions, policy that focuses on strengthening the legal backbone of eviction defense may fail to affect tenants who are simply seeking to move on as soon as possible and reach a place of stability. A good area for further inquiry would be asking tenants how they feel about lawyers generally as a resource. Would they be comfortable reaching out to a lawyer, or do they feel more comfortable reaching out to non-lawyer advocates?
One organization that focuses on prevention, rather than resistance, is HomeStart in Boston. HomeStart’s first line of defense in eviction prevention is a rental assistance payment program that seeks to help tenants halt the eviction process and pay back rent. HomeStart also has non-lawyer advocates who accompany clients to Housing Court, where they assist in negotiating feasible payment plans with landlords. HomeStart’s focus on holistic services and stability, rather than legal defense, may feel more accessible and comforting to tenants.
Ken’s Story: I’d Rather Get Services than Engage in a Legal Fight
Ken fell behind on rent and was served with an eviction notice after failing to resolve the issue informally with his landlord. Ken decided not to seek out legal aid or resist the eviction. He figured that the legal process would be too expensive. Plus, because he was behind on rent, he believed that he had no chance of asserting a legal defense.
Ken was more comfortable reaching out to Southwest Behavioral and Health Services, where he was placed with a caseworker. Ken had a great experience seeking out holistic services. He was able to secure financial assistance to find a new home, and his caseworker also assisted him in filling out housing assistance applications. Ken now has Section 8 housing.
Problem 5: High stress in the Eviction Journey
Several tenants communicated that they might have the ability to search for resources if the housing problems were happening to someone else, but that their ability to problem-solve was significantly clouded by their high levels of stress. Tenants have to balance family obligations, work, health, and other life stressors. The emotional turmoil of housing insecurity means that it is often not feasible to seek out proper channels of assistance under these circumstances.
The reality of eviction is that even the most resourceful of tenants are often unable to figure out where to go to get help. Even if tenants know their rights, it may be asking too much for tenants undergoing this traumatizing process to resist.
Perhaps interventions should therefore be centered around providing tenants the assistance of a third party, like a Navigator, who can take on the burden of finding resources. In other words, interventions that focus solely on empowerment and self-advocacy may fall short in these situations of heightened vulnerability.
Problem 6: Accessing Services is Burdensome
Aside from the problems of tenants not knowing about services — there are problems for those who have taken that step on their justice journey, are trying to get help, and still it is not solving their problem.
Many tenants who attempted to secure financial or legal help struggled to actually make it work.
One tenant, Darlene, actually sought legal aid, but the offices she contacted were unresponsive due to overwhelming demand. Darlene became frustrated, and ultimately stopped trying to seek out legal aid when the stress of her impending eviction became overwhelming.
Another tenant, Linda, was frustrated by the ERAP process. Her ERAP payment would take months to process, but she had very little time to pay the rent she owed. Linda ended up having to borrow from friends and family to stay in her home. Multiple tenants expressed a desire for an easy-to-access, uniform service for rental assistance.
Problem 7: A desire — but no outlet — to help others
One of the most unfortunate ironies of eviction is that it is such a widely shared experience in some communities, yet the experience of being evicted is completely isolating. Many tenants who have experienced an eviction scare gain practical knowledge about best practices, but that knowledge is lost if not shared with others.
Several tenants expressed gratitude that they were able to share their eviction stories, and were hopeful that the information they relayed would help others in similar situations. A surprising number of tenants showed an interest in becoming more formally involved in eviction prevention and attending events to share their experiences.
Being evicted is a disempowering experience, and we heard tenants express that talking about their experiences was helpful. People seemed to appreciate having their voices heard, even if just for a brief interview. Eviction is a community problem, not an individual problem, so interventions should seek to integrate larger communities.
Jen’s Story: I have hard-won experience — how can it help others?
Jen has gone through eviction several times. She experienced manipulation and invasions of privacy when she had unofficial housing contracts.
After being in these two situations in which she was taken advantage of by landlords, she now feels empowered to speak up for others in the Vietnamese community. She knows many people are facing the same issues, and she wants to use her voice to stand up for her community. During our interview, she asked if there are ways that she could help spread key information & get more help to people who are in situations like hers.
Eviction Prevention Ideas, Based on Tenant’s Experiences Tell us about
Based on the conversations we had with tenants across the country, the class identified 3 key takeaways from the eviction process that are integral to any user-centered solution. If services and policies are going to reach tenants, engage them, and help them solve their key problems — then they should be designed with these guiding principles in mind.
Eviction Prevention Principle 1: Early, Preventative Communication is key
If a service is going to reach people & be used by them — then the service provider needs to already be in communication with them before the landlord-tenant crisis boils up to possible eviction.
That means that legal aid, court, ERAP, and other groups need to be building a relationship with tenants and landlords as early as possible.
For each tenant that we spoke to, communication during the eviction crisis — primarily between tenants and landlords, though also with families, employers, court employees, judges, government officials, and more — seemed to fail. The tight timelines of evictions can jam already busy communications lines, and even a day of unresponsiveness or a misunderstood court order can be the difference between a family staying in their home with their back rent paid, or living in temporary housing while struggling to find a new home.
Facilitating clear communication throughout the eviction process will be key to ensuring fair, mutually beneficial outcomes. And often that means building up a communication channel or relationship before a person is in a highly stressful timeline.
Eviction Prevention Principle 2: Isolation is disastrous, and there is power in peer-to-peer support
Almost each conversation that we conducted with evicted tenants revealed the overwhelming sense of isolation that endured throughout their eviction processes.
With no one to turn to, tenants were consistently forced to adopt short-term, fight-or-flight thinking to best cope with the situation at hand. This often meant accepting unlawful evictions, or not knowing who to call to access the legal aid they were eligible for.
When tenants have no support through the eviction process, they must consistently make decisions out of necessity. Supported, connected tenants, on the other hand, are much more likely to fight for their rights and reach mutually beneficial solutions.
This points to solutions that build up community networks, issue-spotting bots, peer-to-peer navigation — -and other solutions that can help identify when someone is going through an eviction crisis and be a supportive, accessible, low-burden way to find resources and make strategic choices.
Considering that many tenants have hard-won expertise in navigating eviction choices and services — can there be initiatives that unleash peer-to-peer support in communities? This can overcome isolation & build community knowledge of what to do.
Eviction Prevention Principle 3: Tackle the Low Awareness of Help Resources.
Right now, tenants and landlords have very low awareness that groups can help them with their problems or evictions. They don’t know that there are legal aid groups or ERAP services.
Tenants are nearly universally lost when they receive an eviction notice or are made aware of an informal eviction process. Up to the point of eviction, they have received no education on how to manage an eviction process or their rights as a tenant. Generally, once the eviction process has begun, eviction education is almost useless — dealing with a current landlord, in addition to working to find a suitable new home, is stressful enough.
Even in cities with robust tenant services and resources, like San Francisco, tenants still do not know who to reach out to when they are served with an eviction notice, and are thus not able to make use of the available services. Tenants must be informed enough to know where to turn, even if this is just knowing an urgent, non-emergency number, like 311.
How do we get more people to know what to do when facing eviction? Ideally, there can be public education campaigns like over social media, news, schools, and other places. And there can be memorable, easy-to-access channels to reach out for help.
Key Opportunities for Courts, Local Governments, and Legal Help groups to prevent evictions
Inspired by current policy solutions and pilots across the US, we used these key takeaways from tenant interviews to determine three potential opportunities for intervention in the current eviction landscape:
Establishing Mandatory, Early Mediation
Currently, almost all jurisdictions see eviction cases go straight to the courtroom. Tenants often choose to forgo their right to a trial out of intimidation. Or, they don’t want the stress of having an adversarial ‘fight’ at the same time as they are juggling a possible housing move.
With mandated mediation, tenants have the opportunity to meet the landlord on a more even playing field, where mutual benefit is incentivized for both parties, in addition to offering a better opportunity to maintain the tenant-landlord relationship. Courts benefit, too, from reduced caseloads.
This program has worked well during the pandemic in Philadelphia, where the city’s Eviction Diversion program has mandated that landlords go to mediation with their tenants before they are able to evict them.
Philadelphia is unique, though, and many municipal and state jurisdictions face political opposition to any measures perceived to be biased toward renters or more costly than conventional courts. The program also fails to address informal evictions.
While not a cure-all, and while an eviction notice mandating mediation remains frightening for many, we believe this could be an important step toward empowering both landlords and tenants to achieve an agreeable, workable solution that cuts costs and effort for all involved.
Community-Based Housing Navigator Programs
Given the discouraging prevalence of isolation during the eviction process, the potential to empower tenants to find their best solution through support and companionship is very important to experience-centric innovation in the eviction landscape.
With housing navigator programs, like the NAACP pilot program in Richland County, South Carolina, tenants at any stage of the eviction process can be connected with a community member who has been trained to understand the local eviction landscape and can educate tenants on their options and the available resources. This engages the local community on the issue of eviction, and provides both support and a know-your-rights knowledge base for tenants.
Still, this comes with challenges: navigator recruitment and training, maintaining the boundary between advice and Unauthorized Practice of Law, and the organizational overhead. Even when those are addressed, if tenants in need don’t know about the program, it can also be yet another helpful resource that goes unused. Nonetheless, when executed correctly, navigator programs have the potential to guide isolated and uninformed tenants to their best interest outcomes.
Renter Education and Simplified Notices
Most importantly, in our conversations with tenants, we found that eviction is nearly always an emergency. Even when renters expect recourse for nonpayment of rent, or were threatened by their landlord in the past, an eviction is always a moment of stress that no one feels prepared for. The opportunity here is obvious: What if eviction were something that every renter was prepared for? Or, what if every tenant at least knew one website to visit or number to call in case of urgent eviction needs?
This is the case in Milwaukee, where the Rent For Success Program has worked hard to ensure that every tenant in the city has access to basic information and education to enable successful renting, beneficial to both tenants and landlords. While this solution may meet the most needs, and serves a clear function to better enable the earlier two, it too has challenges. How does one implement such a program? Is it mandatory for all municipal renters? Despite these questions, education is an exciting opportunity for individual municipalities to develop unique, local programs that can iterate, evolve, and grow to have tangible impacts on both landlords and tenants.
Courts should also follow best practices in transforming eviction lawsuit notices — like their Complaint and Summons. See the Legal Design Lab’s redesigned eviction complaint made in conjunction with Hamilton County Courts in Ohio.
Next Steps for Tenants & Eviction Prevention
From this initial class project, our Lab is working on a larger research project to understand the key barriers that tenants and landlords have when it comes to accessing the justice system & services that can help them avoid evictions — and get to stable, safe housing.
This includes:
Please write if your group is also working on eviction prevention or similar challenges — and what you have learned about people’s barriers to getting help and resolving their problems in safe, equitable, and just ways. What can we be doing better in our courts, legal aid groups, and rental assistance efforts — to better engage, activate, and empower people with housing problems?