Tag Archives: legal aid strategies

Occupied: Day 53

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Happy New Year! It’s weird that a fresh new start on the calendar has no point in life to mark it as this saga drags on, but there we are.

I can’t talk about everything right now, and we go back to court on Monday. This should be for the final eviction hearing, but “final” is a small word in legal matters.

At the hearing Dec. 22 the legal aid lawyer had filed paperwork to spread the time out. It didn’t work as the judge shorted the times, but on Dec. 23 my lawyer was in another court in another county, and the legal aid lawyer at the eviction there had filed the exact same motions. And got six weeks to get the stuff and look it over.

Courts vary widely, which I found out after going to inspect my property Dec. 29. The judge had set the time for noon and allowed me to bring a plumber. We arrived at 11:45 and right from the getgo the guy was so aggressive, my plumber refused to get out of the car. He slumped in his seat, eyes wide as saucers, as the guy railed at him.

So that went badly and got worse, as after I had to enter the house by myself, that also went badly. I’m not often frightened. I’m no shrinking violet. But I wound up going back to my attorney’s office and bursting into tears. And seeking a protective order.

The preliminary order was denied. His threat to me was “conditional” because he had said “if you do that again,” then the threat.

Another woman was seeking a protective order, seated in the pew behind me at court. She whispered to me, during a break when the judge went to look something up, that by those standards her threat was also conditional. Her downstairs neighbor had said if she turned him in for smoking again, he would come at her with a baseball bat.

We squeezed hands, then he denied me, and called her up. I pray she got hers.

So now there is a hearing on a protective order set for the same time as the eviction. Life gets interesting, doesn’t it? I spent a night away from my house while getting some locks in order. The guy has sent two messages about coming to collect stuff from my house. Monday can’t come fast enough.

Occupied: Day 46

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So I can’t write in detail about the Dec. 22 eviction court date because the dude got Legal Aid, and astonishingly enough, this introduced some hilarity to events as well as cemented a final date of Jan. 5.

I respect and support Legal Aid. It’s not my suggestion that Legal Aid is to be laughed at; they do amazing work for important reasons. So let me explain just one thing about the day in court, and we will save the other funny stories for after the ruling has been made (Jan. 5).

The Legal Aid lawyer sent (on the Thursday before the Monday court date) a demand something called a Bill of Particulars. The bill asked seven questions, requiring documents for each.

My lawyer said this was highly unusual for an eviction, and since three weeks is the standard response time, it could be seen as a stall tactic to keep the dude in housing for another month while they thought of something else. I have started looking up some of the ways Legal Aid plans its strategies. There’s not a lot blatantly available on the Net, but a few people who have dealt with them in good faith have suggested that stalling and draining the coffers of the evicting party seem to be common approaches.

So my lawyer walked into the courtroom prepared to tell the judge that we would reply to the bill within two working days, because this had dragged out long enough. I assured him I could pull together all the documentation for the seven questions within that time, the bulldozers in my front yard notwithstanding.

(We had a plumbing issue: tree roots in the pipes. Not a hard fix, but an immediate need, and hence the guys showed up the same morning I was prepping for court.) My friend Amelia took pity on me and offered to take me back to her house so I wouldn’t have to time my bathroom visits with dashes to Walmart and the grocery store. And so we could print the documents there.

But my lawyer never even got a chance to say this. The judge had been very kind and prescient with the people before me, all of whom were having to own up to debts of a few thousand dollars, mostly from overdue rent. He joked with them about peanut butter balls and Christmas traditions and put them at ease even as he bonded them over for debt collection. He was great at reading people quickly, and matching energy.

So before my lawyer even spoke,the judge had sized us all up, and he said, “Right, my next available trial date is Jan. 5. So everyone will have their paperwork in by this Friday.”

A slight slump appeared in the shoulders of the Legal Aid lawyer. I almost felt sorry for her. This might be called getting hoisted by your own petard, when you try a tactic and it turns out creating difficulties for you.

Perhaps the judge knew that the court would be closed Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Which meant his “By Friday” meant “by 28 hours from now.”

Amelia and I bought booze, picked up a ream of paper, and went to her house. One hundred and twenty pages later, on the morning Dec. 23, with my friend driving the getaway car, we left copies with my attorney, filed one bundle with the court, and drove the third to Marion with a slip the Legal Aid office there could sign to show they had receive the documents on Tuesday.

Then we went to lunch.

The many funny stories that were part of this process, and the other funny things that happened in court, I will wait to tell you. My friend Laura was right: this is gonna make a helluva book.