Tenants

Tenants – please DO NOT CALL US to represent you in an eviction-related matter.

We do not represent tenants in eviction cases.  We do handle some tenant work under the CRLTO involving security deposit recovery.  Otherwise, we cannot accept an engagement from a tenant.

What does this mean for you if you are a tenant?  It means we will be unable to talk to you if you call us.  We cannot (and will not) spend time on the telephone discussing general tenant-side issues with tenants.  We also will not be able to refer you to a tenant’s rights attorney or to provide you with names or phone numbers of people who might be able to help.

Why?  Lots of reasons.  First, because we might be representing your landlord and we don’t want to find ourselves with a conflict of interest.  Second, because we view things from the landlord side of the word, tenants would be better served by a tenants’ rights attorney who is well versed in eviction defense from the tenant perspective.  Third, we are a business and we only have so much time in the day to “sell” to our clients and we don’t sell that time to eviction defense clients.  In the end, we just are not a match.

We don’t intend to be mean or harsh about it.  In fact, despite our request that tenants refrain from calling us, many still do and, in a sense, they are “stealing” time from us.  I know they don’t think of it that way.  They probably are a bit worried or maybe even scared and they are desperate for help.  Unfortunately, we just can’t help.  Luckily, there are MANY fine tenants’ rights attorneys in this city.  I respect many of the attorneys in the tenants’ rights bar immensely.  Even better, they are usually pretty easy to find with a call to the bar association or a search on a search engine.  We wish all tenants good luck.