Legal Infrastructure Organizes Eviction: Evidence from Philadelphia

The filing-side legal infrastructure of eviction is studied using the Philadelphia Municipal Court docket. Using 755.004 landlord--tenant records filed from 1969 to 2022, with 747.125 residential filings, it shows that eviction is organized upstream by a concentrated plaintiff-side bar, durable plaintiff--attorney dependence, repeated use of the same properties, and repeat exposure of tenants to the court system. In 1983--2022, the ten most active plaintiff attorneys handled an average of 82.0% of represented plaintiff-side cases, compared with 14.7% for the ten most active plaintiffs. Large plaintiffs are also highly dependent on dominant counsel: among plaintiffs with at least 101 cases, the mean top-1 attorney share is 78.3%. Repeated filing is likewise central. Across the residential docket, 50.6% of cases occur at addresses with a prior filing in the preceding year, and 24.6% occur at addresses with six or more prior filings. Those repeated addresses are usually same-plaintiff repeats and are processed through a more default-heavy, agreement-light pathway. A narrower mechanism is also examined: plaintiff adoption of specialist plaintiff-side counsel. Filing-margin event studies show adoption-linked reorganization rather than clean throughput effects, while within-plaintiff and within-plaintiff--property comparisons show the most stable changes in judgment by agreement, fee share, and lockout-trigger language. The contribution is an upstream account of eviction as plaintiff-side legal infrastructure: a layer of concentrated counsel, repeated places, and recurring tenants through which filings are produced before any courtroom bargaining occurs.