High-Volume Plaintiff-Side Counsel and Single-Appearance Eviction Cases in Philadelphia

2026-05-19

AI Summary

This study examines whether plaintiff attorneys with high caseloads exacerbate adverse outcomes—such as default judgments and writs of execution—for tenants in single-hearing eviction cases in Philadelphia. Leveraging over 750,000 landlord–tenant records from 1969 to 2022, the analysis employs within-plaintiff and within-property fixed effects, regression discontinuity designs, and tests for reverse causality to control for confounding factors. The findings indicate that high-caseload attorneys significantly increase plaintiffs’ monthly filing volume and the number of buildings involved in litigation by 2–5%, yet they do not uniformly worsen individual case outcomes. Localized effects emerge only near specific caseload thresholds. These results challenge the prevailing intuition that high-volume attorneys inherently accelerate unfavorable rulings, revealing instead that their primary impact lies in scaling up litigation activity and accelerating procedural tempo, rather than systematically undermining tenant protections.

Abstract

Among 755,004 Philadelphia landlord--tenant records filed during 1969-2022, 396,163 residential cases involve tenants who appear exactly once in the observed docket. In unadjusted comparisons, single-appearance cases handled by high-volume plaintiff-side counsel are more likely to advance to the writ-of-possession and served-writ stages, but no more likely to end in default. Comparisons within the same plaintiff, and within the same plaintiff at the same property, show no broad premium on adverse case outcomes such as default, judgment, or fees. The clearer pattern is organizational: after a plaintiff adopts or switches into high-volume counsel, monthly filings rise by about 2-5% and the number of distinct buildings reached rises by a similar margin; near the prior-year top-10 attorney threshold, cases display local differences in default and enforcement; and continuances under specialist counsel are more closely linked to default. Non-flat pre-treatment trends and imprecise reverse-direction estimates from attorney exits restrict the strength of any causal claim. High-volume plaintiff-side counsel therefore functions as a mechanism of filing scale and procedural sequence, not as a uniform escalator of case outcomes or as a cause of any individual tenant becoming single-appearance.

Problem

• eviction
• high-volume counsel
• single-appearance tenants
• landlord-tenant litigation
• case outcomes

Innovation

• high-volume counsel
• eviction filings
• single-appearance tenants
• organizational mechanism
• causal inference