Active cohort

Eviction Notice Defect Spotting

Help a legal aid worker read a tenant's eviction notice, flag the defects in it against statute, and turn those flags into defenses and a court response.

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This page is the shared target for this situation. Any court, legal aid office, or builder working on it in their own region can take the vision, the blueprints, and the standards here instead of starting over, and set the parts that are local to them. The point is that the same work is not designed from scratch in every county.

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The Package

Here is where each shared asset stands for this workflow. The functional agenda is the furthest along. Other assets are being extracted from a studio prototype build and need to be validated across more implementations.

Open for review

Functional Agenda

What a defect spotter needs to do, from reading the notice through flagging defects to generating a court response. Four scope tiers let a team see only the requirements that apply: from a detector that reads and flags, up to a supervised deployment that files a response.

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Working draft

Conformance Standards

The quality bar a system must clear before it should be trusted with real cases. Covers detection accuracy (does it find the defects that are there?), false positive rate (does it flag things that are not defects?), evidence quality (does it cite the right rule and quote the right text?), and safety gates for high-stakes situations.

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Working draft

Reference Architecture

How to build a system that reads a notice, applies statutory rules, and produces flagged defects with cited evidence. Applies a rules-first principle: if a check can be done with deterministic code instead of a language model, it should be. The model handles messy document reading; the rules handle the legal logic.

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Planned

What is common and what is local

The split between the parts any jurisdiction can take as they are, such as the structure, the checks, and the evaluation, and the parts each place has to set for itself, such as the statutes, the forms, the deadlines, and local practice. A team should be able to see which is which before it starts building, so it adapts what exists rather than rebuilding it.

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Planned

Stories from teams who have built this

Write-ups from teams who have already built something here: how they put it together, what they would do again, what they would not, and the materials they can share. If your team has one of these running, or half built, tell us about it and we will write it up for the next team.

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Working draft

Evaluation and Testing

A benchmark of synthetic eviction notices scored against multiple label sources at once, reporting per-defect precision, recall, and F1. The evaluation protocol separates document-reading accuracy from legal-rule accuracy, so you know which part of the system is failing.

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Working draft

Implementations

One studio prototype exists so far, tested on synthetic notices. The cohort is documenting the design decisions, what worked, and what would need to change to move from prototype to pilot on live matters across multiple jurisdictions.

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Planned

Masterclass

A course that walks a mixed team of legal and technical staff through scoping, building, testing, and deploying a defect spotter, using the assets on this page as the course materials.

Coming as assets mature

What This Workflow Is

Someone photographing a legal notice with a phone and writing that they just got it and do not know what it means.
Where the work starts: a tenant photographs the notice taped to the door.

Most tenants who lose an eviction had a defense they never raised. A common one lives in the eviction notice itself. A pay-or-quit notice has to meet strict statutory requirements, and a notice that gets them wrong can be defective on its face. A worker who can spot those defects, and the defenses that live outside the notice, can turn a likely default into a contested case.

An eviction notice defect spotter is a tool that reads an uploaded notice, tests it against the governing statute's requirements, and produces a list of flagged defects. Each flag names the governing rule, quotes the exact text from the notice that is the evidence, and explains the defense it supports. The output feeds into a court response.

The system applies a rules-first principle: if a statutory check can be done with deterministic code rather than a language model, it should be. The model handles messy document reading (OCR, layout, handwriting). The rules handle the legal logic (is this notice period correct? is this amount properly itemized?). This separation makes the system auditable and predictable.

Who this serves: Legal aid housing attorneys, court self-help staff, pro bono volunteers, and any organization helping tenants respond to eviction notices within court deadlines.

Join This Cohort

The Eviction Notice Defect Spotting working group is developing the shared assets on this page. The cohort steers what gets built. Members shape the agenda, review standards, and contribute implementation experience from their jurisdictions.

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