The Impact of Legal Representation on Court Outcomes in Landlord-Tenant Cases

Abstract

I examine how the presence of legal representation in landlord-tenant eviction cases interacts with case context to influence court outcomes. Specifically, I leverage the variation in representation levels for both tenants and landlords to examine the factors impacting judicial decision making in cases from the Mercer County Superior Courthouse Civil Division. Using a dataset that accounts for representation rates among tenants and landlords, whether tenants were represented by civil legal aid attorneys, the amount of rent the tenant owed and the experience levels of landlord attorneys, I find that the presence of an attorney on the tenant’s side substantially decreases the probability that the court will approve an eviction. The size of the decrease is significantly large: a represented tenant is 61 percentage points less likely to receive an eviction than an unrepresented tenant. I further find that no other variables significantly predict the frequency of evictions. These results have important implications for assessing the importance of civil legal aid programs, and contribute to the empirical literature on the effectiveness of legal representation on landlord-tenant case outcomes.