Routinized Eviction: How New Property Management and Legal Technologies Abuse the Law through Scale

Sociologists and legal scholars maintain both a long-standing interest in how the legal system advantages privileged groups and a more recent interest in how existing law struggles to regulate new technologies. Yet few scholars have attempted to reconcile these lines of inquiry to understand how new technologies mitigate or exacerbate inequalities in and around the legal system. Using property management and eviction platforms as an example, this paper discusses how legal processes and technological developments together abuse gaps in the law. It argues that state eviction laws, niche legal services, and new property management technologies enable and encourage property managers to file evictions en masse, manipulating the legal system to extract additional income. This additional income is not derived from actual evictions or rent collection but from legal threats that coerce tenants to pay supplementary fees. The routinized collection of such fees suggests that new technologies permit privileged groups to use the legal system at an unprecedented scale, reaping rewards from laws designed for limited use.