Eviction Court Rule to Increase Eviction Costs
Williams, Zinman, Parham P.C., Attorneys at Law, August 2019,
Where property managers go for legal answers
Our firm has been saying for a while that the property management legal industry will be changing due to the negative perception being created about landlords. The changes have started. In the past several years, tenant-advocate groups have proposed numerous rule changes to make the evictions process slower and more complicated. Our firm has repeatedly filed written comments objecting to such needless rules which have been written solely to delay evictions. In the past, we have successfully defeated such proposals, but just last week a new rule was adopted that will make evictions more costly and serve no legitimate purpose.
The Arizona Supreme Court passed a new court rule requiring that for every eviction a landlord files, the landlord must attach the lease and related addendum, as well as a six-month ledger. These documents must be served to every resident with the Summons and Complaint. The rule will become effective on January 1, 2020.
The alleged reason for the new rule is that some residents do not have this documentation. This claim is without support as all residents have a right to get a copy of their lease when they sign it and, when an eviction is filed, they can request this information at the initial hearing. Moreover, in the vast majority of cases, the residents fail to appear; thus, the rule increases the costs for every resident, while only a small portion will ever use these documents.
While the rule may seem straightforward and not that significant, the problems arise once a cost-analysis is done. Currently, when an eviction is sent out for filing, a process server is given six copies of the following: a one-page Summons, a one-page Complaint, the notice, and the resident-information sheet. The six copies are comprised of four pages, for a total of twenty-four pages. These are filed with the court and then served to the occupants. Given that the average lease we see is anywhere between 10-52 pages, the amount of paperwork to process, file, and serve will increase exponentially in January, 2020. Because of this, the rule will force an increase in attorneys’ fees and process serving costs.
As for the attorneys’ fees, this extra paperwork will: (1) increase printing costs; (2) require additional administrative time to put together the documents; and (3) require additional legal time to review each lease to verify that the resident’s personal information is not included. While we do not suggest it, many landlords include resident’s personal information in leases, including social security numbers and/or phone numbers. Steps will therefore have to be taken to prevent the disclosure of this information to third parties. In evictions, process servers are allowed to post-and-mail the initial pleadings. This means that if there is personal information included in the lease, it could potentially be posted on the resident’s door for anyone to see. While it is a landlord’s obligation to remove this information before it is submitted, our office will have attorneys and staff review each lease and redact the information, if found. It is important to point out that liability exists for property managers and owners who fail to redact the information on their leases; therefore, while we will review such documents as a courtesy, property managers are on notice that they should redact the information before it is sent to our office. Also, most landlords do not currently provide a full copy of their lease to our office; this practice will have to change as well.
This rule will also significantly increase the cost to serve the documents because a process server will have to organize the volumes of paper, and potentially post-and-mail the documents. While such documents are currently able to fit in a standard envelope and sent by certified mail, in the future, due to the size of leases, the mailings will only fit in manila envelopes and will be much heavier.
If this paperwork is not included with the Summons and Complaint, the judge can issue sanctions at the initial hearing, which may include dismissing the case in its entirety. In other words, the rule must be followed carefully.
This rule was passed last week and our office will determine how to handle it in the next few months. Unfortunately, this will require our attorneys’ fees and process-server fees to increase. We will run tests and calculations to determine the exact increase we expect to charge clients. Please note that this will be a cost that you can pass through to your residents. Of course, if the eviction costs increase, I expect less residents to be able to pay and stay. In other words, while this rule is supposed to be resident-friendly, it will likely do more harm than good to most residents.