I'm Being Sued by a Tenant! Do I lawyer up? Racine WI

[Ryan Behnke]

So I received notice that I am being sued by our last tenant in Racine Wisconsin. The back story is that I had a property management company taking care of the single family property but I was notified about issues with the home and or tenant. So a few months after the tenant moved in there was water in the lower level of the house which had a bedroom and family room, about 255 sq ft of the 1750 sq ft home. I went back and forth with the PM company for a month troubleshooting some possible issues before getting a foundation company in there. Turns out there needed to be some drain tile installed. After we found out about the drain tile, about two weeks later then tenant had bedbugs in the property. We were told to not have anyone in the property until that was taken care of. That took 2.5 months before the house was safe again. Once we got the go ahead I scheduled the foundation company to come in and take care of the work. They came in and did the work almost 2 months later and it took about a month to get the areas back in order, new carpet and baseboards back on. The tenant then moved out a month early and abandoned the property. After cleaning the property and getting it back in order we used all of their deposit plus a little over 2K. We sent the 2K they owed to collections. Then a little over two months later the property management company and I are being sued for a little over 8K. They want half of their rent back for the months the work was being done on the two rooms. They want 2K for grievance. And they want us to pay for half of their bed bug treatment. I don't think most or any of this will stand in court. We tried to move forward on the basement work as fast as we could. We were never dragging our feet. The bed bug issue we proved was the tenants that brought them in because we lived in the property before and had our new house tested and we did NOT have bed bugs so they would have had to bring them in. And grievance I don't believe is a thing with rentals, correct? This would be the first time I would be going to a trial. Is small claims that difficult that I can't represent myself or should I lawyer up? I had one go to the initial appearance since we live out of state. Or do I see if they will drop their claim if we drop the counter claim for the 2K? I would entertain this just to save me time and money.