When I first got my start as a lawyer in New York City, I was hired by a boutique real property law firm. Back in 1992, the economy was truly horrible. I had these massive student loans and my starting salary was a whopping $26,000. I was fortunate enough to receive two offers of employment. The one I did not take was for a criminal law firm. I had worked as an intern for the District Attorney’s office and also spent a summer working for the federal public defender.
The attorney that I worked for at the DA’s office was trying murder cases and his ambition was to get a job working for a firm that did PI defense work. What I learned was that it was very difficult to transition into civil law once you did criminal law. So I took the offer with the boutique real property firm. I was trying my first case within a week of passing the bar exam.
This boutique real estate firm did a substantial amount of landlord tenant work. Back then when we represented tenants, the name of the game was seeing how long you could keep a tenant in possession of an apartment without having to pay rent. We are talking in terms of years.
When I started practicing in California in 1996, I was amazed to see a difference. The rule I quickly learned was that the tenant really better have a good reason for not paying rent or else that tenant would be evicted. And pretty quickly, too. I recently agreed to take on a case representing a landlord in the City of Los Angeles. The issue is whether my client’s property is subject to the rent stabilization ordinance (“RSO”) or not. The Department of Building and Safety did two different inspections after the tenant complained. Each time it found that the property was not subject to the RSO. I made a motion for summary judgment in an effort to avoid the trial. At the hearing on the motion, the Judge informed us that he was not bound by the DBS findings, that the case was a “sticky one” and that we would have to have a trial to resolve it. It would seem that Landlord Tenant law can still be quite a mess.
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