Law & Public Policy Blog

Hiring and Training Lawyers to Implement Tenants’ Right to Counsel

Evan Garber, Law & Public Policy Scholar, J.D. Anticipated May 2021

On November 14, Philadelphia became the fifth city in the country to guarantee low-income tenants the right to legal counsel during eviction proceedings. With its unanimous passage, the legislation brought a sense of hope for tenants’ rights advocates. However, it also introduced a collection of considerable challenges. Most importantly, legal service organizations (LSOs) designated to implement this right will have to hire, and train, more attorneys to handle the windfall of new clients. While this may seem like a mere personnel problem on its face, it contributes to a larger challenge facing the policy—disparate qualities of representation between service providers.

Cities that have previously guaranteed tenants a right to counsel still experience difficulty hiring attorneys. In New York, the first city to recognize this right, there is a coalition of 15-20 LSOs that represent low-income evictees. According to Susanna Blankley, Coalition Coordinator at the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition, hiring is one of their most pressing challenges. This is partly because these positions are difficult to fill. It is hard to attract attorneys to such an arduous field that offers relatively low pay compared to other areas of law. Even when there are applicants, there is no guarantee that they will be hired. In some cases, they just are not qualified enough for the position. In others, the organization does not have enough supervisors to manage new recruits. In either case, the inability to hire more staff attorneys impacts these organizations’ ability to represent their growing share of clients.

The challenges do not just stop at hiring; they pervade into the training process and actual practice. In San Francisco, another city where tenants have the right to counsel, it takes an LSO roughly three months to train a new staff attorney. In response, the LSO coalition provides monthly trainings to help train new lawyers and assist existing ones in honing their skills. However, these are only available internally. Organizations and pro bono attorneys outside of the coalition do not have access to this same kind of reinforcement. Even after they are trained, staff attorneys require a lot of support from their supervisors. They often need help managing their caseload, dealing with transient or uncooperative clients, and maintaining stable mental health in a practice with high stakes and sometimes disheartening outcomes.

Together, the need for supervisorial support and the variety of different actors providing counsel create disparities in the quality of representation tenants receive. Without the adequate support they need from supervisors, staff attorneys cannot provide the most effective counsel they otherwise could. Additionally, organizations like Community Legal Services (which already employs skilled housing attorneys) will likely provide more robust representation than pro bono attorneys who, although having their hearts in the right place, do not have as much experience with eviction cases. So despite the fact that on paper all low-income tenants are guaranteed counsel, in reality, some tenants will receive better outcomes than others based on who handles their case. And when the result of a case is whether someone stays in their home or is thrown out on the street, having uniform quality of representation is imperative to successfully implementing this right.

Fortunately, Philadelphia is in a position to learn from other cities and address these problems from the outset. There are three lessons in particular that can and should be readily applied by LSOs in Philadelphia: prioritization, coalition building, and training reform.

By prioritizing supervisors within their internal hierarchy, LSOs can alleviate some of their hiring challenges, while also improving employee satisfaction and performance. LSOs should focus on training and promoting existing staff to supervisor roles before making other recruitment decisions. This will enable them to hire and train more staff attorneys as their personnel needs increase with their intake. Additionally, having more supervisors means that staff attorneys can more readily receive the support they need to increase their effectiveness and prevent them from burning out.

LSOs designated to provide counsel should also form a unified coalition. Both New York and San Francisco have done so, and with considerable benefits. In a coalition, LSOs can share resources, coordinate their approaches to providing counsel, and unify to lobby the City on ways to improve landlord-tenant relations. Specifically, a coalition can administer its own training sessions to supplement those of individual organizations. This spreads the cost of training new staff attorneys across the entire coalition and can also accelerate the process. Coalitions can also standardize this training, which can help correct imbalances in representation quality between different organizations with different standards.

Speaking of training, LSOs in other cities have modified their training curricula to better equip staff attorneys to succeed. They go beyond the basics of eviction proceedings, training attorneys in crisis de-escalation, intersectionality theory, and more. For example, the New York coalition compiles a list of the largest evictors in the city. It then uses this information to prepare attorneys to counteract the power dynamics that exist between large corporate landlords and their low-income tenants. Additionally, LSOs in other cities have stressed the need to document training materials in an easily accessible, itemized, and online platform. This would not only allow staff attorneys to reference certain aspects of their training when necessary, but it would also allow non-coalition members to receive reinforced training as well. All of these steps contribute to making attorneys from across organizations more effective and, in turn creating, better outcomes for tenants.

Cities like New York and San Francisco are still working to fully implement their tenants’ right to counsel. But the lessons they have learned in the process are still instructive for Philadelphia’s quest to do the same. Prioritization, coalition building, and training reforms are just a few of the ways LSOs in other cities have tried to address their problems meeting their demand and eliminating representation disparities. While none of these are a cure-all for the difficult reality of implementing this policy, they are sure to provide low-income tenants here in Philadelphia with the most impactful rollout of their new right.