As cases rise, nonprofit trains tenants to defend themselves in court

Over the past year, Eviction Defense Network, a nonprofit group of lawyers defending tenants facing residential evictions across Los Angeles County, has been using an in-house program to train its clients to represent themselves in court.

“We started this program out of necessity and I was disgusted with even thinking that people should go to court alone,” according to the group’s executive director and trial attorney, Elena I. Popp. “But after watching our students start to own the courtroom and overcome that fear of facing a judge, they started to win with confidence and I realized it was a totally doable thing.”

As cases started to overwhelm the group’s staff of five attorneys in January 2022, the organization began offering workshops to its clients over Zoom, Popp said.

By February this year, the workshops were morphed into a scheduled slate of classes led by two supervising attorneys called Tenant Empowerment Program. The lectures are completed over Zoom, and the review of legal documents and trial notebook preparation is completed in person at the organization’s downtown Los Angeles office.

“We have a total of five attorneys, but only two, including myself, go to trial. We have a motions attorney and two supervising attorneys, but if we take those people off of their duties, then these cases don’t get prepared properly,” Popp explained. “For us, capacity is 36 fully prepped cases at a time to trial attorneys, which became a lot to deal with. We stopped retaining cases, and because of that we were being threatened with sanctions for not having trial counsel or availability.

“So we started this program where we teach people how to prepare themselves,” she said. “Our current annual caseload is between the 500 and 600 range, but with Tenant Empowerment Program, it helps lighten the load because it’s seeing between 60 and 135 people each day. We currently have 252 students.”

The program has accumulated a 99% success rate in the downtown Los Angeles court with 43 successful resolutions for their clients so far, according to Popp. Some of the outcomes include tenants being given more time to pay overdue rent, debt forgiveness, and deals with landlords when moving out of a unit, according to Popp.

“Now we’re getting students from all over the county coming here. It’s been a life changing experience in a positive way for all of us,” she said.

Consultation at Eviction Defense Network is free, while representation is based on a tenant’s ability to pay, starting from zero. Popp said the group is funded primarily by the city and county, along with donations.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the group joined the Los Angeles County Right to Counsel Coalition and established a program called StayHousedLA, which offers additional workshops and legal assistance to tenants struggling to stay in their homes.

BASTA Inc., the largest nonprofit tenants rights organization in Southern California with 16 attorneys across four offices, launched a pilot program in 2020 called BASTA Universal, which exclusively defends tenant eviction cases through the StayHousedLA program.

“With the tens of thousands of evictions filed in LA County every year, I think everyone is feeling a bit short-handed,” said Diana Alvarado, director of operations for BASTA Universal, when she was asked Wednesday to comment on the Eviction Defense Network’s program. “Our group is constantly looking for more talented, multilingual attorneys who are passionate about tenants’ rights. I think we all ideally prefer to have attorneys representing tenants sooner rather than later in the eviction process. Until we have attorneys available to represent every tenant in every ZIP code, programs like the Tenant Empowerment Program can help supplement the larger StayHousedLA efforts and provide an important piece of tenant backup and support.”

She added, “So far it seems that Tenant Empowerment Program empowers tenants to navigate a legal system that is not designed for tenants left alone to help themselves. Tenants with attorneys at every step of the way is the goal, and the StayHousedLA program is making a real difference in that area. In conjunction with such efforts, programs like Tenant Empowerment Program can provide a useful safety net and lifeline for tenants seeking help.”

Christopher S. Elmendorf, a professor at UC Davis School of Law who teaches property and land use law and is on the advisory board for California Housing Defense Fund, also expressed support for the Eviction Defense Network program. “We need a way to provide lower cost legal services to tenants and others,” he wrote in an email on Tuesday. He advocates “licensing non-lawyers to practice certain low-cost forms of law.” In the meantime, though, what Eviction Defense Network is doing “sounds like a step in the right direction.”