A unique collaboration between two law schools and a private company has produced a tool designed to help low-income tenants avoid eviction and seek redress for unsafe living conditions.
The new tool, being unveiled today, is called Hello Landlord, and is designed to help tenants more effectively communicate with their landlords about issues that can lead to eviction.
It was developed largely by law students as part of a semester-long collaboration among the LawX Legal Design Lab at Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, the Innovation for Justice program at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, and SixFifty, the tech subsidiary of the law firm Wilson Sonsini.
I have written several posts about BYU’s LawX, a program in which law students use design thinking to develop solutions to problems in access to justice. Last year, LawX released its first project, SoloSuit.
For the 2018-2019 academic year, as I reported here last August, LawX joined forces with Arizona’s newly launched Innovation for Justice program to explore ways to reduce evictions in their home states. Along the way, they also partnered with SixFifty, which is directed by Kimball D. Parker, who also directs the LawX program.
Yesterday, I spoke with Parker and Stacy Butler, who runs the Arizona program, to learn about what they developed.
Over the course of the semester, the students observed more than 220 eviction court proceedings and spoke with dozens of stakeholders, including judges, landlords, tenants, social services providers, attorneys and journalists.
By the time a tenant is served with an eviction notice, they concluded, the eviction process in both Arizona and Utah is too rapid and rigid to afford an opportunity to stabilize the rental housing at stake.
For that reason, they decided to focus on building a tool that would help tenants
