Colorado lawyer was so good at suing landlords, he made a firm out of it

Attorneys at Sue My Landlord never have to explain what they do at a dinner party.

“It’s being up front about what we’re trying to do,” Kelly Reeves, managing attorney of the Greenwood Village law firm, said about the name. “There aren’t a lot of people doing this. Let’s cut through that and not hide behind names.”

According to the tenant-based law firm, it protects people against unethical landlords and management companies. But its origin wasn’t based on revenge or profit — it was devised after a nearly $11 million lawsuit shook up Ross Ziev’s career.

Ziev, the founder of Sue My Landlord, had been practicing law since 2011, even sitting on the board of the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association a few times. But when Kate Keaten came to him with her living situation, his attention turned toward taking down malicious property owners in the state.

Keaten and her daughter, Delaney, had been living at Littleton’s Main Street Apartments for nearly 13 years. In 2017, the Keatens began experiencing headaches, allergies and nosebleeds. Their service dogs also became sick, and they were smelling methamphetamine fumes.

It was ultimately discovered that the Keatens’ downstairs neighbors were cooking meth, but the property managers refused to acknowledge it.

Kate Keaten said she fought with property managers for about four months, begging them to test or investigate the lab downstairs. During a recorded phone call between the Keatens and the management company in April 2018, a representative told them, “We cannot pursue something that is not there.”

Keaten said she contacted nearly 15 attorneys, all of whom turned her down. Eventually, the landlord company evicted the neighbors — it was for unpaid rent, however, and not anything drug-related.

For Keaten, more had to be done. Both she and her daughter had suffered irreversible brain damage.

“Nobody else would listen to us. Law enforcement also didn’t believe us,” she said. “I have a huge thing with justice. You’re not going to kick us down.”

Eventually, she was put in contact with Ziev, who took the case and ran with it, eventually winning a $10.5 million award. Then the property owner, Terra Management Group, went bankrupt, unfortunately, leaving the Keatens with significantly less than the initial award.

The company also destroyed evidence of the lab in an attempt to skate past a lawsuit, former 18th Judicial District Judge Frederick Martinez said in a 2021 order after the trial.

That case struck a chord in Ziev, causing him to create the subtly named law firm in 2025.

“What I found is that people who are tenants so often don’t have a voice,” he told Westword. “[Landlords] can prey on the people who are less fortunate. It’s such an emotionally charged industry. We are talking about people’s livelihoods, how they raise their kids. That becomes a big issue, and it should be.”

“For one side, it’s a business. For the other side, it’s their life.”

The concept of despising landlords is not new. A quick Google search can find countless forum posts and articles calling for the heads of property owners. Often, people are venting about late maintenance requests, astronomical rent or unfair penalties.

Denver certainly isn’t a stranger to this indignation. In 2021, Denver City Council passed an ordinance requiring landlords to obtain a residential rental property license, but the uptake has been slow, with the city issuing fines and threats of criminal citations to residential property owners earlier this year.

“I do not believe all landlords are scumbags. A lot of landlords do it the right way,” Ziev said. “The problems we are seeing in Colorado are that we have these corporate interests coming in and just buying these units as a source of income without doing the work.”

Ziev pointed to a recent lawsuit in which a company from North Dakota bought 500 residential units in Aurora. The company then employed one property manager for all of the properties. If a tenant were to file a complaint, it would be through an online portal outsourced to Costa Rica.

“They had never been trained on Colorado law,” Ziev said.

People tend to publicly commiserate about bad landlords because the relationship between a renter and property owner is emotionally one-sided, according to Reeves.

“For one side, it’s a business. For the other side, it’s their life,” she said.

According to Ziev, Colorado has relatively tenant-friendly laws. For example, Senate Bill 24-094 went into effect in 2025, strengthening renter protections by refining the already-in-place Warranty of Habitability law. Some of these improvements included requiring crucial repairs to be completed within 24 hours and providing alternative housing during large-scale repairs.

But even though Colorado is a renter-friendly state, Reeves points out that most of the laws took effect after 2018.

“We’re not talking about decades and decades of law. We’re, a lot of times, introducing landlords, tenants and judges to what is actually on the books,” she said. “The laws are good, but they haven’t been widely communicated yet.”

Fighting back

Despite rules in place to protect renters, bad landlords take advantage of tenants because the tenants can’t fight back, according to lawyers at Sue My Landlord.

“What I’ve found is that people who are tenants so often don’t have a voice,” Ziev said.

For example, the Keatens were living in low-income housing during the meth lab incident. While they did fight management, a part of them remained scared they would be evicted.

“People need someone to advocate for them, because they’re afraid they’re going to be evicted. If you are evicted from low-income housing, you lose your voucher. You could end up homeless,” Delaney Keaten said.

Reeves said the threat of eviction is often used by landlords as a tactic to silence tenants.

“Displacement is a traumatic experience. That’s exploitable,” she said. “Tenants, for good reason, are afraid of that.”

But Sue My Landlord is filling a “tremendous” need, according to Keaten, as Ziev was the only lawyer willing to take her case.

And here’s the kicker: After the Keatens were awarded money for the lawsuit, they didn’t want to enter the housing market yet. They also didn’t want to go back to large-scale rental communities. Ziev’s rental property, coincidentally, was available.

So Ziev built a wheelchair ramp, lowered the rent and moved the Keatens in.

“If he hadn’t been there, we don’t know where we would have been,” Kate Keaten said, choking through tears.

He sued their landlord, and then became their landlord.

“I would do it again,” Ziev said. “I just want to provide good, safe housing for people.”