Tenant, landlord attorneys switch from litigation to education

Tenant and landlord attorneys say they are shifting away from litigation and toward education of their clients, following the Judicial Council halting all unlawful detainer cases for three months after the governor’s shelter-in-place order is lifted.

“Just as tenants are pressured by landlords, landlords are pressured by their banks. So that’s where many efforts by landlord attorneys will be focused,” said Louis Anthes, a Long Beach sole practitioner who has handled matters for tenants and landlords.

Eric Toscana, founder and lead attorney at Tenant Law Group in San Francisco, said his firm and associated Bay Area tenant firms also switched or were in the process of switching to an educational role.

“We do counsel a lot of people; we have a whole advice attorney practice where a tenant purchases blocks of time with an attorney. We’re seeing a big uptick in these,” Toscana said.

Eviction orders trickled in up until Tuesday, when landlords “could without any obstacle file eviction cases,” said Daniel Bramzon of BASTA Inc., California’s largest tenant litigation firm. “Tenants were still getting and we were still filing answers to unlawful detainer summons. We don’t have to do that for the foreseeable future.”

Following the order on Monday, a summons can’t be issued to start an eviction process, a reality that will likely result in not a single eviction being carried out for at least four months, no matter what the circumstances.

“We should applaud the Judicial Council in bypassing all the politics, although we’re still getting 100 calls a day from concerned tenants,” Bramzon said. BASTA, he added, was still hearing stories of landlords pushing tenants to sign separate repayment agreements promising to pay back rent, which he said was illegal.

David Piotrowski, a Los Angeles sole practitioner and landlord attorney, said he spends most of his time on the phone encouraging clients to negotiate with their renters. “Have some communication with them, talk to your tenants,” Piotrowski said. “Cooperate with each other and work out a deal satisfying both parties.”

Piotrowski said many landlords were calling him confused by what they saw as a hodge-podge of state and local relief measures introduced in recent weeks. The attorney said many landlords’ own mortgages that would make a six- or 12-month rent repayment structure ruinous.

While process evictions are halted, Toscana said his firm was seeing instances of “constructive eviction” in which some material aspect of a housing situation deteriorates to the point the tenant is forced to move out for their own safety, for instance if the heat goes out in a unit and the landlord refuses to fix it. Toscana said he’s been instructing tenants dealing with such cases to move out first and then begin building a case against the landlord for the future, when the courts reopen.

Bramzon and the team of attorneys at BASTA are now shifting their efforts into educating tenants who call the firm’s offices. “There’s no such requirement that tenants have to divulge private documents at this stage in the game,” although production of such documents could become necessary when eviction courts reopen, he said.

That future requirement is “ambiguous depending on geography” according to Bramzon.

“The order is a pro health and safety order. It’s not pro landlord or pro tenant,” he said of the Judicial Council’s mandate.