Our Innovative Partnership with LA Superior Court

Today, courts across the country must confront a critical issue: the rising tide of small-scale but high-stakes cases that have come to dominate state civil court dockets, including debt collections, evictions, home foreclosures, and certain family law matters. These high-volume dockets share several core problems, among them a lack of meaningful participation, just resolution, and transparency. To explore new frontiers of innovation, the Rhode Center and Legal Design Lab are partnering with the LA Superior Court (“LASC”)—the largest trial court in the nation. The partnership, which began in 2024, has two core objectives:

Identify systemic and sustainable ways to foster court users’ meaningful access to the Court
Support the Court and its staff in the core mission of resolving disputes in fair, accurate, and efficient ways

Challenges and Opportunities in LASC’s Eviction Docket

Across the U.S., landlords file 3.5 million evictions each year. In California, evictions displace 500,000 tenants annually, and in Los Angeles County alone, some 47,000 eviction cases were filed in 2023. In a large number of these cases, tenants fail to respond despite viable defenses that could delay or prevent displacement, with rippling consequences for housing and family stability, employment, and health that fall most heavily on vulnerable populations.

During the first year of the partnership with LA Superior Court, the Stanford team rigorously studied and identified barriers to court engagement, focusing, as a point of entry, on eviction cases. Our research, published in A Blueprint for Expanding Access to Justice in Los Angeles Superior Court’s Eviction Docket, surfaced core problems of high-volume civil dockets and proposes that the Court focus improvements along four frontiers of justice innovation.