From Policy to Practice: Administrative Burden and Human-Centered Design in Tenant Right to Counsel Programs

Abstract

Millions of low-income tenants in the United States face eviction each year, and the vast majority of tenants in these cases proceed through the civil court system without representation. Despite the proliferation of tenant “right to counsel” laws across the country, access to legal assistance remains limited even in jurisdictions where it is theoretically guaranteed. This dissertation investigates the persistence of the access to justice gap in eviction proceedings through a mixed methods examination of Washington state’s groundbreaking statewide right to counsel law. Using qualitative methods, natural language processing, and a randomized controlled trial, I generate novel evidence about the sources of administrative burden that tenants face in their efforts to access legal assistance and explore how public policy can help address these barriers. In the first study, I analyze qualitative data from 23 in-depth interviews with tenants who faced eviction judgments before accessing legal assistance. This analysis shows that the civil legal system imposes substantial learning, compliance, and psychological costs on tenants – and that these burdens stem largely from the eviction process itself, rather than from the design of legal assistance programs. In the second study, I apply document-conditioned large language model (LLM) analysis to 195,050 case documents from 8,234 eviction cases filed in Pierce County, Washington between 2022 and 2024 to quantitatively measure tenants' ability to overcome critical administrative checkpoints and access legal representation. I find that submission of a written response and attendance at preliminary hearings are strong predictors of legal representation and more favorable case outcomes, and that the relationships between procedural engagement and outcomes shifted substantially as the policy environment changed throughout the study period. In the third study, I present the results of a randomized controlled trial of an informational postcard designed to reduce learning and psychological costs and thereby increase hearing attendance. Results show that this low-cost behavioral nudge significantly increased hearing attendance and marginally increased eligibility screening rates, and the effects on downstream case outcomes are not statistically significant but suggest that the intervention may have a more modest positive impact on outcomes for tenants. Together, these studies demonstrate that the learning, compliance, and psychological costs of participating in the civil legal system create substantial barriers to justice even when legal assistance is widely available. By applying the theoretical framework of administrative burden and a human-centered design methodology to eviction proceedings and right to counsel programs, I show how targeted reforms rooted in empirical evidence of tenants' experiences can increase participation in the legal process and potentially improve other outcomes for low-income households.