Mark and Lauren Melton and a team of lawyers make up the nonprofit Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center. They want to defend every tenant facing eviction who doesn’t already have representation.
According to Eviction Lab, which tracks evictions across six states and 31 cities, evictions are happening at or above pre-pandemic levels.In most courts, eviction proceedings happen quickly, local attorney Mark Melton said. If a tenant facing eviction isn’t in court, the result is usually a default judgment forcing them to leave their home. Even when tenants do show up to court, if they don’t have a lawyer, their chances of successfully defending against the eviction are slim.
Melton explained how some judges handle these cases. “If you don’t know the right questions to ask this landlord to prove up your defense, then you’re evicted,” he said. “If you were on trial for murder, this is the equivalent of the prosecutor walking up to the judge as a non-lawyer and saying ‘He did it,’ and the judge going ‘All right. Guilty.’ You didn’t submit a single piece of paper as evidence. You didn’t call a single witness.
Landlords have been changing some of their eviction practices since Melton and his team have started defending people against them. They’ll often hire private companies to help process these evictions. Melton said some call these companies “eviction agents.” But, the Meltons want to expand their services even further. They want to saturate the courts to defend people against every eviction in the county. Right now, they have five full-time lawyers. “We think we need to get to about 15 [lawyers] to really hit what we deem to be full saturation,” Melton said. That would be enough to have attorneys in every justice of the peace court , to take on appeals and handle other related litigation.
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