A Blueprint for Expanding Access to Justice in Los Angeles Superior Court’s Eviction Docket

The civil dockets of U.S. state courts are increasingly dominated by high-volume and low-value but high-stakes cases such as eviction, debt collection and foreclosure. This Report examines the access-to-justice crisis in high-volume state-court litigation through a detailed study of nearly 150,000 eviction cases in the Los Angeles Superior Court, the nation’s largest trial court. Drawing on court data, interviews, focus groups, ethnographic observation, and audits of digital tools, it shows how these dockets are shaped by corporate landlords, self-represented tenants, and outcomes that are the result of default judgments rather than meaningful participation on the merits. The Report identifies six core problems: fragmented legal protections and help resources, weak court data systems, major knowledge gaps for litigants, uncertainty among court staff about how much assistance they can provide, barriers facing legal aid and community organizations, and digital services that are hard to find, poorly integrated, and difficult to use.

In response, the Report offers a practical reform agenda centered on four roles courts can play. First, to become a learning organization, the Court should expand its data collection and data-analytic capacity, increase transparency and knowledge sharing practices, and build frameworks for ongoing evaluation of innovations. Second, to become a trusted and effective information hub, the Court should equip its users with centralized, clear, accessible and actionable information about how to navigate the system and meaningfully participate in their cases, including by redesigning key notices. Third, to become a collaboration hub, the Court should facilitate and strengthen the work of justice partners and develop tools to connect court users with appropriate forms of legal help (e.g., through self-service triage and referral tools). Finally, to become a digital hub, the Court should create integrated, user-centered, end-to-end digital pathways for litigants, and develop infrastructure for the responsible deployment of artificial intelligence tools, including litigant-facing assistants and court operations support systems (e.g. for compliance-checks). Altogether, the Report advances a framework for incremental, evidence-based reform that builds on courts’ role leveraging data, design, technology, and institutional partnerships to promote more accessible, equitable, and effective pathways to justice.