Students with Brigham Young University’s legal design lab are seeing success in a new software designed to help people respond to debt collections. The BYU law students are now working to reduce the number of evictions in Utah.
The school’s legal design lab, called Law X, designed a software called Solosuit earlier this year. It’s set up like TurboTax, except users are guided step by step to respond to debt collection lawsuits. Law X Director Kimball Parker said the goal was to have at least 300 people use the software in the first year, but that number has more than doubled in the first six months.
Close to 7,000 Utahns are evicted each year according to Parker. While that number is significantly less than the 70,000 debt collection lawsuits, he said the consequences are more severe.
“For a debt collection, you wages will get garnished, if you lose that debt collection case,” Parker said. “In an eviction, you lose your home. Studies have shown that a lot of those people who get evicted end up in either temporary or permanent homelessness.”
Parker said the new software is not yet catered to evictions. Both can be confusing, but people have 21 days to respond to a debt collection, while evictions only allow three. Parker is worried the current system allows landlords to take advantage of their tenants.
“There’s always an uptick of eviction filings on Friday,” Parker said. “It’s not three business days, it’s three days total. Some landlords will post an eviction notice on Friday and then have the tenant out of there by Monday.”
BYU law students will be required to identify specific problems with Utah’s evictions and apply a solution, but it has to be finished in one term. Parker said BYU is teaming up with the University of Arizona’s Innovation for Justice program to find out if the same eviction patterns are happening in other states.
“This isn’t a class where we talk about problems and then think about how to solve them and then the class is over,” Parker said. “We’re going to figure out what this problem is and we’re going to solve it. We’re going to do something to help alleviate this problem by January.”
Parker says the solution may not be in the form of another software program, but could also be efforts to change eviction laws.
