> CB: * * * How exactly does an attorney
> prevent an eviction for non-payment of rent
> if the client doesn't have any money for rent,
> or their heat back on for back bills if they don't
> have any money etc. ? :>)
Subject of course to very serious (structural) caveats (re. which, see last comment below), by comparably doing for the indigent client exactly what the good/creative attorney for the moneyed client would do: Based on knowledge/experience adopt/use insofar as ethical and otherwise appropriate to the case other sorts of defenses - e.g., what might be any number of procedural and, if you will, related "technical" ones - besides the just addressing the simple-minded, "Does s/he have the money to pay the rent as claimed?" in a way that takes account of the prevalence of the (in part perhaps not sufficiently appreciated) below noted reality to the indigent client's (at least: short-term) advantage.
> By and large, civil cases are about money,
> and people without much money are going
> to lose most of them.
That's right, sort of. But this sort of vague/generalized comment may not sufficiently address some related considerations (and, at that, not just even if but especially because most "civil cases are about money"):
Many judges - including, certainly judicial administrators who monitor what trial judges do - are sensitive about the dollar costs of judicial administration to The System overall, too, and so can be enlisted, in any particular case or group of cases, in helping achieve a con sensual resolution that might result in a disposition the (non-structurally/non-politically thinking) indigent client might consider a "victory" and, in fact, may (at least in the short term) be that (of sorts).
Also, the example posited above - a hypothesized landlord-tenant relationship and dispute - appears implicitly to presume that the landlord will be able and willing to spend $$ in any particular case including for an actually ethical and otherwise competent attorney; but this hardly is always so, and the knowledgeable/creative tenant's lawyer may know and understand how to perceive and, if present, exploit whatever is the reality in this respect to the tenant client's advantage.
The above-noted caveat nonetheless does remain and perhaps ought not just be noted parenthetically, however, and it is also illustrated by the presumptive example above: that the "victory" of preventing an eviction of a tenant from a heatless and vermin/rat-infested apartment does not address (and arguably in any number of ways might contribute to) the reality that such a "win" gets for the economically poor tenant . . . what? - . . . the right to continue reside there as, meanwhile, the "System" is hardly designed to encourage rent-strikes (much less well-organized ones) or increase actually livable housing stock in anything close to a structural manner.