What a good reasonable accommodation demand letter tool does
A tenant with a disability needs the landlord to change a rule, and a clear letter setting out the request and the law behind it often settles the matter without a complaint or a case. Here is what a good tool does, in order, with a question for you at each step.
This list comes from a working prototype of a letter drafting assistant, from what two rounds of testing on it found, and from the example letters a legal aid office writes by hand today.
Answer the questions on the parts you know from your own practice. The Commons team reads every answer, fixes what the list gets wrong, and takes the harder questions to the cohort working on this area.
The call comes in to an intake line, and somebody on staff works out what the tenant needs before anything is drafted. That decision stays with a person, and the tool starts from what that conversation already established.
What a good tool does
Start from the intake conversation that already happened, rather than putting the tenant through the same questions a second time.
Let the staff member open the case and pull the names, the addresses, and the email addresses already on file for the tenant and the landlord.
Let that person type those details in when the connection to the case system is down.
Give the tenant a short code and a number to call, and let the code expire within a day.
Ask the tenant whether they are willing to be interviewed by an AI before transferring them, and record that they agreed.
What it must never do
Begin the interview before a person has decided that a demand letter fits this situation.
Who decides that a demand letter is the right step in your office?
Answer this
Part 2
Getting the tenant onto the call
Much of this work happens on the phone, and speech recognition struggles with the details that have to be exact, such as a name or an address. One misheard letter in an email address or a zip code ends up in the finished letter.
What a good tool does
Ask at the start which language the call runs in, and hold the whole call in that language.
Take a keypad entry as well as speech for anything short, such as the language choice or the code.
Use the code to load the details already on file, so nobody has to spell an email address out loud.
Fall back to collecting those details by voice when the code has expired or does not match, rather than ending the call.
Ask for the tenant’s agreement again at the start of the call, and let them stop at any point.
Keep spoken replies to a sentence or two, because silence on a phone call feels much longer than it does on a screen.
What it must never do
Depend on speech recognition for a name, an address, an email address, or a zip code that is already on file.
What would it take to transfer a caller from your phone system to a line like this?
Answer this
Part 3
Asking about the rule and the disability
The interview opens with the landlord’s rule rather than with the tenant’s disability, because the question the letter answers is which rule the tenant cannot follow. Opening the other way turns the conversation into an inventory of somebody’s health.
What a good tool does
Open with the rule or practice the tenant cannot follow because of a disability.
Ask one question at a time, in plain words, and rephrase a question the tenant does not follow.
Take the tenant’s own account of their disability as they give it.
Ask how the disability affects their use of the home.
Handle more than one disability in the same conversation without mixing them together.
Accept that the tenant may have no medical documentation, and say that none is being asked for.
What it must never do
Name a diagnosis the tenant has not named, or steer them toward one from the symptoms they describe.
Give medical or legal advice.
What do you ask a tenant that this interview does not?
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Part 4
Working out what is being asked for
The letter has to name one change to one rule, and to connect that change to the disability. Testing covered requests well beyond the no pets waiver that the example letters mostly carry.
What a good tool does
Ask what change the tenant wants, in the tenant’s own words.
Ask why the disability makes that change necessary, because the connection between the two is what the letter rests on.
Handle the range of requests that actually arrive, including waiving a no pets policy, waiving a pet fee, waiving an income requirement, moving a rent due date, moving an assigned parking space closer to the unit, and accepting a form in another format.
Set one deadline for the landlord to reply, which is 14 days, rather than letting a tenant in distress pick a deadline of their own.
Say what the tool does not yet cover, such as a request that the landlord change the property itself by installing grab bars or a ramp.
Which accommodation requests does this list miss?
Answer this
Part 5
Ending the interview
A conversation that stops early still produces a letter, and that letter has blanks where the landlord’s name and the requested accommodation belong. In testing, an answer of "not sure" was enough to end a conversation that should have carried on.
What a good tool does
Carry on until everything the letter needs has been collected.
Confirm the details once at the end, in a single summary, rather than after every answer.
Close with what was said, what happens next, and when to expect contact, including that an attorney will be in touch in the coming days.
Hold the facts of the case outside the conversation itself, so a long call cannot push the earliest answers out of reach.
What it must never do
End the conversation because an answer was short, unclear, or hesitant.
Show the tenant the draft letter, because the attorney confirms it with them instead.
Where would a conversation like this fall apart with the people you serve?
Answer this
Part 6
Drafting the letter
These letters follow a formula, which is what makes drafting one by machine possible and what makes any variation easy to spot. The draft has to look like the letters the office already sends.
What a good tool does
Follow one structure every time, which is the date and header, the salutation, the opening, the paragraph on the disability, the accommodation request, the legal basis, the documentation and deadline, and the closing.
State the request plainly near the top, so the landlord sees what is being asked without reading to the end.
Cite the Fair Housing Act and the state fair housing statute, and leave out statutes the office’s own letters do not use.
Describe a disability as one that substantially limits one or more major life activities rather than naming a mental health diagnosis.
Draft in English even when the interview ran in another language.
What it must never do
Add a legal claim the tenant never raised, or a citation that is not on the written list.
Hand over a letter with blanks in it, instead of saying what is missing.
Which parts of your office’s letter never change?
Answer this
Part 7
Attorney review and approval
No letter reaches a landlord without an attorney reading it, and the attorney also speaks to the tenant before it goes. That conversation is where a misunderstanding in the interview gets caught.
What a good tool does
Put the draft, the full interview transcript, and the case details on one screen.
Let the attorney edit the draft, draft it again from corrected information, and keep notes on the case.
Require an attorney to approve the letter before it goes anywhere.
Support the call the attorney makes to the tenant before sending, so the tenant confirms the facts and still wants to send it.
Record who approved the letter and when, and export it in the formats the office already uses.
What it must never do
Let a letter reach a landlord without an attorney’s approval.
What would you need on that screen before you put your name on a letter drafted this way?
Answer this
Part 8
Keeping what the tenant said safe
Everything collected here is sensitive, from the disability itself to the home address, and the drafting system is usually not the system built to hold client data.
What a good tool does
Keep client details in the system built to hold legal client data, and know what the drafting system stores and for how long.
Expire the access code within a day, so an old code cannot reach a case.
Leave previous client letters out of the training data, and draft from the office’s example letters instead.
Have the storage and the handling checked by somebody independent before this runs on real cases.
What would your organization require before client details went through a system like this?
Answer this
Part 9
Watching it in use
What gets logged is the only way to tell whether the tool is helping, because every letter has already been through an attorney by the time anybody sees it.
What a good tool does
Start on a limited set of cases that runs from simple requests to complicated ones, with attorneys comparing each transcript against the letter it produced.
Log the transcript, the draft, the edits an attorney made before approving, the cases that needed heavy revision, the cases where something was missing, and the conversations tenants abandoned.
Read that log every month for the questions that confuse people, the corrections attorneys keep repeating, and any sign that the tool gave legal advice.
Change the interview and the drafting instructions from those patterns, and test a change before it goes live.
Watch what this does to staff time, since the office may not have been writing these letters for tenants at all before.
Stop and review when client information is exposed, when attorneys cannot reliably review what they are approving, when a change raises how much correcting they have to do, or when the tool makes more work than it saves.
What would make you turn this off?
Answer this
What happens to what you write
Every note comes to the Commons team. We read it, correct what this list gets wrong, and publish a new version saying what changed. The questions that need practitioners to argue them out go to the cohort for this area, which writes the detailed specification from what comes back.
A note about one line is as useful as a note that adds a whole step. If what you know is which accommodation requests come through your door, write about that.
The two agendas for this workflow
You are reading this one
Step-by-step agenda
This is the first round, and it collects what the people who do this work say a tool has to do, in the order the work happens and in plain words. Read it to argue with it, to correct it, and to say what your jurisdiction needs.
Not written yet
Functional agenda
The cohort writes the detailed specification after this round, using the answers that come back from this page. It numbers every capability, states the standard each one has to meet, and sorts them by the scope of the system being built, so a builder can build against it and an evaluator can test against it.
