The Paletz Law Blog

Efficient Courts Benefit the Landlord AND the Tenant

October 8th, 2024 | By: Matthew I. Paletz, Esq.

A recent column caught my attention this week and not in a good way. I believe it is misguided, short-sighted, and, as usual, unfairly criticizes my clients in property management. I felt compelled to share my thoughts regarding the opposition to the “need for speed” for landlords as one who works tirelessly to attempt to move proceedings along when tenants stop paying rent. 

I use the word “attempt” because it’s been increasingly difficult to schedule expedited court dates for those who have shown an inability to fulfill the rent requirements of their leases. At Paletz Law, we are persevering everyday through this courtroom backlog. So when I read the opinion of someone who is clearly taking a one-sided academic approach and therefore failing to take into account the practical consequences to all parties concerned, I felt the need to set the record straight on what is actually occurring today in our courtrooms, specifically in Michigan. 

In an excerpt from her symposium entitled “Who Says Evictions Should be Efficient,” Kathryn Sabbeth, who is a professor at Rutgers Law School, opines that:

The “summary” eviction process is designed for speed. But speed can sacrifice due process, other individual rights, and accuracy of outcomes. The summary process also undermines any illusion that courts are in the business of interpreting or developing the law. So, both defendants and the public lose out, individually and in the aggregate. Even the supposed savings of time and money may be questionable.  In most jurisdictions, the vast majority of tenants are unrepresented, so they receive none of the benefit of this scheduling device, and they carry all of the cost. 

People have made this disingenuous argument many times before and will make it again. First, the overwhelming majority of landlord-tenant cases do not rise to the level of in-depth litigation. As such, these cases should be expedited because the underlying claim is largely uncontested. There’s usually no dispute regarding whether the rent was paid or not. Economic hardship, while unfortunate, is not a viable defense. Further, the causal link to lacking legal representation is a fallacy in logic, and tenant advocates consistently omit this pertinent fact. 

Tenants are afforded due process. They receive notice from their landlord and are then served with a summons and complaint. In Michigan, they are then given anywhere from one to multiple hearings after that and advised as to the ability to apply for rental assistance, amongst other additional rights.

Professor Sabbeth also complains about tenants having to sit in the courtroom all day: 

Without anyone to appear on their behalf, tenants must be present for the call of the case and then wait – frequently all morning or into the afternoon – causing them to miss work and other important commitments. The time wasted by tenants and their families, however, saves resources for plaintiffs and courts. Plaintiffs pay for counsel at a flat rate based on the number of appearances, and efficient case processing keeps fees low. Courts, meanwhile, can pay fewer and lower judicial salaries because they churn through cases quickly. This scheduling approach maximizes landlords’ profits and supports court processing of a high volume of cases with few judicial resources, but it is deemed efficient only because of whom the system values and whom it does not. To deem it efficient to keep tenants waiting is to determine that their time has less value than that of the judges or that it is socially useful to keep down the costs for plaintiffs pursuing evictions.

My response to this would be that you say you don’t want people spending an inordinate amount of time cooling their heels in court, but contradictory to your argument, as a practitioner who is there every day for my clients, the courts are just not that efficient. This is not an indictment of the competency of our courts. The ones we work with are all dealing with the adoption of new technologies, budget shifts and personnel shortfalls. However, many courts have gotten progressively worse since COVID. There are some doing better than others but as an example, we are currently dealing with some courts that are taking multiple months to even process cases. And then, taking weeks to process pleadings after the cases were heard. How is that efficient for anyone? 

With all due respect to the tenants involved in these cases, we can certainly be sympathetic to their plight because of financial hardship and the state of the economy. But that’s not to say property owners and landlords are not being negatively affected too. 

The question is: Do our landlords and property owners deserve a more expedited court process when a tenant is obviously in arrears? When you look at a property owner’s contractual obligations, mortgage payments, building maintenance and landscaping, employees on payroll and skyrocketing insurance rates – it’s obvious they can’t survive if they’re not getting timely payment for their apartments, manufactured homes and condos. 

And let me put in my daily plug for Zoom courts. They’re not only more efficient but actually help the tenant in that they don’t have to take time off from work or spend gas money. 

These are the facts that fly in the face of tenant advocates. The more you elongate a court case on something uncontested, you are not making extra money for the landlords, you’re actually putting more financial burdens on the tenant that they will just have to pay later.  

The Bottom Line: Efficient and expedited courts have a positive impact on lower rental costs and the more the courts are backed up, the higher rents will continue to go.