Help a tenant who has been served with an eviction case file an answer in time, with the defenses their situation supports, the fee waiver, and a jury demand if they want one.
This page is the shared target for this situation. Any court, legal aid office, or builder working on it in their own region can take the vision, the blueprints, and the standards here instead of starting over, and set the parts that are local to them. The point is that the same work is not designed from scratch in every county.
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A tenant is served with an eviction case and has a few days to respond. An answer filed in time keeps them in the case. Nothing filed at all ends it with a judgment nobody argued against.
The work is one appointment, usually between 30 minutes and 2 hours. A worker reads the complaint and the notice, works out which ordinances cover the unit, checks who owns the property and whether the company suing is a registered entity, interviews the tenant across every defense the law offers, fills the answer form and its defense attachment, prepares the fee waiver, asks whether the tenant wants a jury, writes a summary for the reviewing attorney, and gets the packet filed and served.
The defense list is the heavy part. In one county the attachment carrying the defenses runs to 22 pages of checkboxes, each citing its own statute or ordinance, and the guide a worker reads alongside it runs to 9 pages. Before a single question is asked, the worker is holding the complaint, the notice, a 2 page intake form, the guide, and the attachment.
Which defenses exist at all depends on where the unit is. A city rent stabilization ordinance, a city just cause ordinance, a county ordinance, the state tenant protection act, a federal program, or none of them decides whole blocks of the attachment at once, and the answer comes from a zoning lookup and the property records rather than from the tenant.
The decisions inside the appointment are legal ones. Whether to deny generally or specifically, which paragraphs to answer for lack of information, which defenses the facts actually support, and whether to demand a jury, which is a door that closes once the answer is filed.
A worker reads several hundred pages of forms and guidance to prepare for each appointment, asks the tenant questions the intake form already asked, and looks the property up by hand in two or three registries. The hours go into preparation, and the tenants nobody can see get a packet of blank forms.
The worker comes to the appointment with the complaint and the notice already read, the coverage flags already looked up, the intake already in the file, and the defense list already narrowed to the topics this case can support, with the raw information shown beside each one. The interview goes on what only the tenant can answer, and the answer, the attachment, and the fee waiver come out of it for an attorney to review.
This is one vision, taken from a clinic build and from the appointment manual the workers already follow. Technology could play out in other ways here, and the cohort weighs them against this one.
Who this serves: Tenants answering an eviction without a lawyer, the self help center workers, volunteers, and paralegals who sit with them, the attorneys who review what they produce, and the courts that receive the answers.
Where this came from: Two quarters of design and prototyping with a self help center in one county produced the material this page is built from, including an honest account of what failed. The cohort for this area picks it up from here.
Housing work does not arrive as one problem. This page covers the answer itself, and these are the workflows on either side of it, with the point where each one hands over.
Eviction notice defect spottingThe notice check is its own workflow, because the defects in a notice can be found from the document alone. What it finds arrives here as defenses to plead. Problems with living conditions in your rentalRepairs the landlord never made become a habitability defense in the answer. The repairs workflow is where the record that proves them gets built, often months earlier. Reasonable accommodation demand letterA refused accommodation becomes a defense here. The letter workflow is where the request was made and documented, which is what makes the defense provable. Reviewing a settlement offer before an eviction hearingFiling the answer is what gets the tenant to the day an offer is handed across. That workflow picks up in the hallway. Motion to set aside an eviction defaultThis is the workflow for the tenant who never filed an answer. It is the way back once a default judgment is entered, and it is harder than answering on time. Jury instructions for an eviction trialThe jury demand made in the answer is what makes that trial possible. The instructions the jury hears are proposed much later, and every defense pleaded here needs one behind it there. Court record retrievalGetting the complaint, the proof of service, and the docket is machinery every one of these workflows needs, so it sits on the common tools page rather than here.The step-by-step agenda is open for review now. The cohort writes the functional agenda and the standards from the answers that come back, and this page carries them when they exist.
What a system here has to do, written as the appointment in order and in plain words, with the question the Commons team wants answered about each part. Start here if you sit with tenants through this and want to say what a tool needs.
Read the step-by-step agenda →What the system must do, from reading the complaint and the notice through the coverage lookup, narrowing the defense list, the interview, the answer form and its attachment, the fee waiver, the jury demand, attorney review, and filing. Two findings from an earlier build belong in the specification: the defense list has to be held as data with a citation on every line, and the step that matches facts to defenses belongs in deterministic code rather than in a model.
How anyone judges whether a builder met the mark: whether every fact it shows traces back to the document it came from, whether a missed coverage flag or a wrong service date fails the whole output rather than lowering an average, how much of the worker’s preparation time it saves, and what the reviewing attorney still has to correct.
The rest of the package follows once those two exist. It covers the baseline numbers, the procurement and contract terms, the reference architecture with the split between what any jurisdiction can take as it is and what each place has to set for itself, the stories and materials from teams who have already built something here, and the tests.
The housing cohort is forming now, and this is one of the workflows in front of it. Members bring what they have seen in their own courts, argue about what a tool here has to do, and read the drafts.