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A semester of collaboration between the UA鈥檚 James E. Rogers College of Law Innovation for Justice program and Brigham Young University law students resulted in Hello Landlord, released on Wednesday.

Tenants nationwide who are having a problem with their rental or have missed a payment can use the free tool to generate a letter for their landlord. Available in both English and Spanish at , the site guides the user through questions like “Why can’t you pay your rent?” to explain the problem and propose a solution.

The 15 students in the program researched eviction court proceedings and spoke with dozens of people involved, including judges, attorneys, social workers, tenants and landlords. Students at both the UA and the Utah university found that the evictions process is so fast that most renters have little chance of avoiding eviction once the process begins.

Last year more than 13,000 eviction actions were filed in Pima County Consolidated Justice Court, according to 蜜柚直播 archives. In nearly three-quarters of eviction actions over the last four years, judges ruled in the landlord鈥檚 favor.

Archives show fewer than 20 percent of tenants in Pima County who are served with an eviction notice even show up to court and so lose their case by default. Only an estimated 5 percent of those who do show up have a lawyer while landlords almost always have an attorney present who specializes in housing law.

Going to court is often not the best solution, says Kimball Parker, a director at BYU Law and president of SixFifty, a law firm subsidiary that collaborated on the project.

鈥淲hen it comes to evictions, the adage 鈥榓n ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure鈥� certainly applies,鈥� Parker said. 鈥淲e found that most landlords don鈥檛 want to evict tenants and are receptive to working with those who proactively reach out. The collaboration with the University of 蜜柚直播 and SixFifty has resulted in an online de-escalation tool that has the potential to help anyone who has missed rent or is experiencing an issue with the condition of their rental avoid legal problems.鈥�

Stacy Butler, director of Innovation for Justice at the UA law school, developed the program and began the collaboration with Parker after a BYU course successfully designed a tool in 2017 that鈥檚 helping people handle debt collection cases filed against them.

Butler says students in the course, which began last fall, wanted to find a solution to a communication gap they observed between tenants and landlords after observing that tenants often didn鈥檛 know how to communicate a problem and landlords felt tenants didn鈥檛 try to resolve payment or rental issues.

Butler hopes Hello Landlord will be accessible nationwide to as many people as possible and that it inspires communities to think about prevention in solving the justice gap.

鈥淓viction is a national crisis, and the ripple effects of an eviction are devastating to families and communities,鈥� Butler said. 鈥淲e went into this challenge knowing that we wanted to design a scalable, bilingual, jurisdiction-agnostic solution that could positively effect widespread change.鈥�