impact of legal counsel on outcomes for poor tenants in New York City's Housing Court: Results of a randomized experiment, The

Law & Society Review, 2001 by Seron, Carroll, Van Ryzin, Gregg, Frankel, Martin

A related and important issue concerns the eventual outcome in society-in the life of the tenants and the condition of their housing-after a final judgment of the Court. For example, it is unknown from this study whether court orders of eviction or stipulations requiring rent abatements or repairs resulted in actual evictions (and perhaps homelessness), abatements of rent, or repairs made (and hence improvement of the housing stock). Tenants may simply move on to another unit before an eviction occurs, and landlords may delay or fail to provide rent abatements or repairs stipulated by the Court. As mentioned, resource constraints prevented a follow-up survey of tenants that would have shed some light on this question of eventual outcomes in society. It would be informative also to conduct a follow-up inspection of the apartments. Still, procedural outcomes remain important in their own right, not only because they have at least a plausible connection to tangible outcomes in society but also because they represent due process of law.

Another limitation of this study is that we cannot directly answer the question, What specifically did the lawyers do that produced these substantive results? We interviewed the CLO attorneys on this question. They report that, substantively, lawyers, either from CLO or pro bono lawyers working under the close supervision of CLO colleagues, were able to perform a number of key tasks because of their familiarity with and understanding of the legal culture of Housing Court. These include (1) determining what is actually owed by way of rent; (2) negotiating a reasonable time period for payment when money is owed; (3) negotiating with or litigating against welfare when, e.g., the agency has not issued the full amount of arrears, has issued them to the wrong landlord, or when the client qualifies for a special grant to cover rent; and, (4) obtaining abatements of rent when repairs were not completed in a timely manner. Each of these substantive steps is extremely difficult to accomplish without representation.

While the findings from this experiment provide robust evidence that low-income clients do better in court with legal representation, the question remains whether some other form of legal assistance short of full legal counsel would be similarly effective in some instances. Louise Trubek, a leader in the area of legal services to the poor, has developed highly innovative programs to use paralegal support to extend services provided to the elderly (see Simon 1988; Doremus 1997). Although housing law may be highly arcane, the range of issues that arises is relatively predictable and may lend itself to a more expansive use of paralegal support (also see Kritzer 1998). Of course, unlike a lawyer, a paralegal cannot advocate directly for a client in court. And, the simple fact that a lawyer appears in court may be the critical factor in explaining the outcome of housing disputes adjudicated in a court of law. Nonetheless, whether paralegal support can be an effective and efficient strategy to augment the legal resources of low-income clients in Housing Court remains an empirical question that could be answered through the design and evaluation of a program.