KY study: longer cases, which happens w/tenant rep, avoid eviction

A study by Cassie Chambers Armstrong (Associate Professor at the Louisville Brandeis School of Law and former Louisville councilmember who sponsored the tenant RTC ordinance) and CJ Ryan (Professor of Law at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law) looked at hundreds of thousands of Kentucky evictions from 2018-2022 and found a connection between case length, representation, and whether tenants were evicted.  Specifically

• Eviction cases took only about 1 month on average from filing to disposition, and 61% of tenants whose cases were this length were evicted.  But for cases exceeding this average time, the eviction rate dropped to 33%.
• Only 19% of cases involving unrepresented tenants exceeded the average case time, but this figure jumped to 66% for represented tenants, with the mere presence of an attorney adding 1.4 months of extra time even when subject to regression analysis.
• Tenants without representation avoided eviction 44% of the time, compared to 65% for represented tenants, suggesting that having an attorney was roughly equal in value to having more time (yet having an attorney is what often led to tenants having more time).
• Jurisdictions within Kentucky that adopted the Uniform Residential Landlord Tenant Act had longer case times, which the author speculates could be due to the additional protections the URLTA confers upon tenants.
• The percentage of tenants facing eviction in urban areas who were ultimately evicted was 46%, compared to 71% in the rural areas.