Legal Infrastructure Organizes Eviction: Evidence from Philadelphia

TL;DR

This study examines the legal infrastructure of eviction in Philadelphia, revealing concentrated legal representation, repeated filings at the same addresses, and organizational patterns that precede courtroom proceedings.

Contribution

It provides detailed empirical evidence on how eviction filings are organized upstream by legal actors and repeated interactions, highlighting structural patterns in eviction processes.

Findings

Ten attorneys handle over 82% of cases annually, indicating concentration.

Nearly half of cases recur at addresses with prior filings, often by the same plaintiff.

Switches to specialist attorneys correlate with increased filings and organizational changes.

Abstract

We analyze the filing-side legal infrastructure of eviction using 755,004 Philadelphia Municipal Court landlord-tenant records filed between 1969 and 2022, of which 747,125 are residential. Eviction in Philadelphia is organized upstream by a concentrated plaintiff-side bar, durable plaintiff-attorney dependence, repeated use of the same properties, and recurring tenant-name exposure. Between 1983 and 2022, the ten most active plaintiff attorneys handled 82.2% of represented plaintiff-side cases per year on average, compared with 14.8% for the ten most active plaintiffs. Large plaintiffs depend heavily on a single attorney: among plaintiffs filing at least 101 cases, 78.3% of each plaintiff's filings are handled by that plaintiff's most-used attorney, on average. Repetition is likewise central to the docket. Across the residential filing universe, 48.8% of cases occur at addresses with a prior filing in the preceding year, and 23.6% at addresses with six or more prior filings; these repeats are usually filed by the same plaintiff and follow a more default-heavy, less agreement-heavy pathway. We further examine a narrower mechanism: strict switches into specialist plaintiff-side counsel, defined as a plaintiff changing attorney to one in the prior-year top ten. Filing counts rise around the switch with non-flat pre-trends, indicating organizational reconfiguration rather than a clean exogenous shock. Within-plaintiff and within-plaintiff-property comparisons yield more stable estimates: judgment by agreement, fee share, waiver language, and corrected lockout-trigger language decline, while deadline language rises. We interpret eviction as a layered upstream process in which concentrated counsel, repeated places, and recurring tenants produce filings before any courtroom bargaining or adjudication occurs.