Mother in Law: Who reads my letters – and yours

Occasionally I try to write a column about legal skills. Those utterly underrated skills that are actually the things we do all day every day. The skills that get our disputes resolved and deals completed, that mean we meet our fees targets, that make our clients happy. 

Some of these skills – maybe all of them – you can only hone over time. But as long as you remain receptive to learning – from colleagues, from your mistakes, even from opponents – you will probably get better at all these things fairly organically.

I only write them occasionally as I’m sure you prefer my tales of Things I’ve Found In My Daughters’ Hair but it is the Gazette after all.

Today I want to talk about written communication. I have written before about grammar, the importance (in my opinion) of good-quality persuasive writing and so on. But I want to talk about taking care to ensure your written communication delivers the right message to everyone who may read it.

Say I write a letter to a solicitor I’ve been dealing with in a long-running dispute. Say, though, earlier that morning I came downstairs to a very sheepish-looking enormous puppy and canine sickness and diarrhoea all over the kitchen floor. After clearing it up I realise I have to get the ironing board out because DALC2 hates the regular-fit school shirts and I have just washed and dried a couple of slim-fit ones. Then I make three different breakfasts, four different lunches and get two different sets of ingredients out of the freezer for dinner. I continue multitasking, arguing and worrying about the dog until I get in my car, where I hit traffic on the way to work. You get the idea. I am in a certain frame of mind and, while my client has been telling me to be more aggressive for a while now, I am suddenly inclined to agree. I am a human and I am affected by all the things going on around me when I decide whether to say in my letter ‘your client’s position seems to have changed somewhat, please would you telephone me to discuss’ or ‘your client is being completely unreasonable in changing his position and I am going to pull your limbs off one at a time’.

You too will probably be familiar with that type of letter, whatever it ends up saying. It may be typed by your long-suffering secretary who immediately judges what kind of day you are all going to have in the office (Reader 1), and goes to your opponent (Reader 2). Your opponent has never really liked you as you are a bit annoying on LinkedIn. His guinea pigs unexpectedly had babies in the night, despite being sold as two boys, and his boiler stopped working so he is feeling a bit smelly. Even if your tone is fairly reasonable, he may feel a bit affronted. (I actually had something similar on the phone recently – I said I was too busy to do something by a particular time and my opponent said ‘well I’m very busy too!’ I had only been commenting on my workload, not his; I wasn’t asking him to do it instead and it was not relevant to what we were talking about whether he was busy or not but he was clearly feeling sensitive).

Your opponent will, most likely, forward your letter to his client (Reader 3), giving his feelings on it at the same time. His client has been living this dispute for two years. Every couple of months he gets a three- or four-figure bill from his solicitor, which is a lot for anyone to pay but particularly someone on a pension like him. He thinks about the dispute every morning from the second he opens his eyes. His wife (Reader 4) goes one step further and sleep talks about the dispute several nights a week. He wants to book a holiday for them both but doesn’t know when they will be in court. The wording of the letter could make him feel despair, or hope.

Your client (Reader 5) will read the letter too, of course. She immediately wonders how many six-minute units she will be charged for it. Anyway, she has been thinking for a while that you don’t understand exactly how she feels about the dispute. She is fighting for the principle of the matter but you keep banging on about ADR. She shows her friend, her accountant and her mum the letter (Readers 6, 7 and 8). Her mum thinks she needs a second opinion, so they go along to another local solicitor (Reader 9) and show them all your letters. The local solicitor’s daughter woke up with a cough sweet and what looks like cat food stuck in her hair, and he is feeling like a neglectful parent. He scraped his car on a wall in the car park on the way into work too. Looks like a bit of a rubbish letter to him, if he’s honest.

I think this is the most important one for me: what would a solicitor instructed to give a second opinion say about my letter? I had something similar recently. In a matter involving a large family, I found out my client was sharing my advice with the numerous other defendants, who were then showing it to their own solicitors. It didn’t matter, but it made me feel a bit strange – informal emails between my client and I copied to various other solicitors.

We all know that the professionals in a dispute or transaction shouldn’t be affected by any of these things, but we all are. We won’t get real consistency until the computers take over, but then the compassion will go too.

Don’t think about how you feel writing the letter, but how everyone else is going to feel when they – all of them – read it. Is it going to have the desired effect, or actually nothing like it?  

There is one more person – Reader 10 – I haven’t mentioned yet. Think about whether your letter will stand up to the scrutiny of a judge.

It is particularly easy these days to dash off a flippant email but you should treat every single one as a reflection of you, your firm, your client and as having the ability to alter (maybe slightly, maybe greatly) the direction of the case, for better or worse.

Some facts and identities have been altered in the above article