Legal Infrastructure Organizes Eviction: Evidence from Philadelphia

2026-04-22

AI Summary

This study examines how legal infrastructure systematically shapes eviction proceedings in Philadelphia, challenging the assumption of judicial neutrality. Drawing on 755,004 landlord–tenant court records from 1969 to 2022 and employing large-scale judicial data analysis, panel comparisons, and micro-econometric methods, the research reveals that evictions are highly concentrated among a small group of specialized plaintiff attorneys and repeat property addresses. Notably, the top ten most active attorneys represent 82% of cases; their involvement significantly reduces the incidence of consent judgments, lowers fee proportions, and diminishes the use of explicit eviction-triggering language. These findings demonstrate that professionalized legal practice actively reconfigures the eviction ecosystem, underscoring the central role of institutional organizational mechanisms in shaping judicial outcomes.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Fair Division
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: AI & Law, Justice, Regulation & Governance
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Responsible Web: Ethical and legal aspects of web-scale data analysis, uses and collection practices

Abstract

We examine how legal infrastructure organizes eviction in Philadelphia. Using 755,004 Philadelphia landlord--tenant court records filed from 1969 to 2022, we show that eviction is concentrated most strongly among plaintiff-side attorneys. In a typical year, the 10 most active plaintiff attorneys, about 3-4% of active plaintiff attorneys, handle 82.0% of represented cases. Filing is also highly routinized. It is largely same-plaintiff filing, concentrated at the same addresses, and reproduced through recurring plaintiff-attorney-property combinations. Eviction, in short, is organized through repeat actors and repeat places. Specialist attorney plaintiff-side counsel changes how cases are handled inside that system. When plaintiffs adopt specialist attorney counsel, filings rise and repeated use of the same addresses increases, although those filing-margin shifts appear to reflect broader reorganization around counsel entry. In stronger within-plaintiff and within-plaintiff-property comparisons, specialist attorney counsel is associated with fewer judgments by agreement, a lower fee share, and much less lockout-trigger language, with weaker evidence for default and downstream enforcement. That structure extends into the courtroom. Court is not a neutral stage: judges and repeated lawyer pairings shape default, agreement, enforcement, and settlement terms. Overall, eviction is organized through a concentrated plaintiff-side bar, repeat places, structured courtroom relationships, and the production of contracts and debt inside court.

Problem

• eviction
• legal infrastructure
• landlord-tenant court
• plaintiff attorneys
• courtroom organization

Innovation

• legal infrastructure
• eviction concentration
• repeat actors
• courtroom dynamics
• plaintiff-side specialization