Girling Law’s 3-Year Success Calculation

Range of Time:  May 1, 2022 through May 1, 2025

Quick Stats:

• Success Rate: 95.40%
• Total Eviction Cases Handled: 950
• Successful Outcomes: 788
• Unsuccessful Outcomes: 39
• Not counted towards total: 123

 1. How we calculate our successful outcomes

Not all outcomes on evictions arise from winning or losing a trial.  There are many different outcomes for eviction cases.  No part of our calculation for a successful outcome involves our law firm representing a tenant at trial.  We do not represent tenants in eviction cases.  

We calculate our success rate by defining the following outcomes as a successful outcome:

• Landlord won before the Justice of the Peace, no appeal.  We attend trial and win a judgment where the tenant appeared at trial (with or without an attorney) AND the tenant did not appeal.  The tenant moved from the property after we won an eviction judgment or we had to request the tenant’s forcible removal.
• Landlord won after a County Court at Law appeal.  Either the tenant lost before the Justice of the Peace and then appealed, or our client lost before the Justice of the Peace and appealed.  Regardless of who appealed, we calculate these cases as a successful outcome if the landlord wins on appeal.  Note that if we won at both the Justice of the Peace and the County Court at Law levels, we calculate only one win for both cases.  
• Settled.  Girling Law facilitated a settlement negotiation with the tenant and the law firm agreed to settlement terms that were within the settlement authority range the landlord provided Girling Law.  This outcome assumes the tenants complied with their obligation to move by a required deadline, or that the tenants failed to meet their moveout deadline and Girling Law enforced the tenants’ promise to move by recording a judgment and executing a writ of possession.
• Tenant moved.  If the tenant moved after receiving an eviction notice from Girling Law, we regard this outcome as a success.  This includes only situations where the tenant moved out before trial.
• Tenant paid.  If, after Girling Law issued an eviction notice, the tenant paid an amount acceptable to the landlord and the landlord instructed Girling Law to halt the eviction process, the case is considered a successful outcome.  

2. How we calculate unsuccessful outcomes

We deem the following outcomes to be an unsuccessful outcome:

• Dismissal before the Justices of the Peace.  If we do not succeed in obtaining a judgment for possession before the Justice of the Peace and the client instructs us not to appeal the decision, the case is considered an unsuccessful outcome. 
• Dismissal before the County Court at Law.  If the client handles their own Justice of the Peace eviction and then hire Girling Law to handle an eviction appeal, but the County Court dismisses the eviction appeal, we consider this outcome unsuccessful.  If Girling Law handles both the Justice of the Peace trial and the County Court at Law trial, we count this as one unsuccessful outcome.  The underlying Justice of the Peace case is never counted as a win if the case is appealed (see Section 3, below).

¹Clients halt representation for many reasons.  A client’s decision to terminate representation can arise from the client’s dissatisfaction with the firm’s handling of the case.  However, in many instances the firm gets an instruction to stop working on the case with no explanation.  Girling Law does not require clients to disclose the reasons for ending termination.  For this reason, the firm often lacks enough information to conclude the tenant paid or moved out early.  Lacking any certainty about the outcome of the case, we remove such cases from the calculation. 

²During the Covid pandemic, the Texas Supreme Court issued an Order to all trial courts throughout the state requiring specific language to be included in their citations.  The Dallas County Constables offices failed to comply with the Supreme Court’s Order.  Because of this error, the Dallas County Courts at Law hearing eviction appeals dismissed hundreds of eviction lawsuits.  Because these errors arose from the Constable’s negligence and not the firms, we have excluded these dismissals from the calculation.  

³In some instances, the landlord’s testimony is required for trial.  This is always the case for eviction trials before County Courts at Law.  This is sometimes, but not often, required for Justice of the Peace trials.  In each of these excluded cases, the landlord was aware that they were required to appear at trial.  In each instance, the case was dismissed because the landlord either forgot about the trial date or was too late arriving at court.  Because these errors arose from the client’s error and not the firms, we exclude these dismissals from the calculation. 

⁴During the law firm’s intake process, our employees sometimes erroneously create multiple new matters for the same case in our law practice management system.  Once created, there is no way to delete the account.  These duplicate cases are then included in the reporting we use to calculate our success rate.