As readers of this blog know, I lost my grandmother last fall. It was sad, but not tragic. After all, she was 99 and lived a long productive happy life. Last week, I (and my siblings) received a very formal letter from a lawyer with an enclosure—under Pennsylvania law, where my grandmother lived, beneficiaries of her estate are required to receive notice of her death. So, the lawyer duly enclosed the official Pennsylvania state language letting me know of my rights (to contest probate, etc.). The cover letter was equally formulaic,
Ladies & Gentlemen:
You will find enclosed with regard to the trust…the notice required under Pennsylvania Uniform Trust Act of your grandmother’s death on November 3rd, 2009.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Here’s the thing—this lawyer was at my wedding, invited to my son’s Bar Mitzvah, and has known me since I was 10. I get the same cover letter as someone he has never met—really? And, even if we didn’t know each other, the letter should be better. How about this as the letter:
Dear Andrea,
I am enclosing the official PA state notice that is required under law. Of course, you already know of your grandmother’s death but we have to send this out. Please call me if you have any questions. In the meantime, hope all is well with you and, again, so sorry for your loss. May her memory continue to be a blessing to you.
That doesn’t take much energy to produce and is only slightly longer time than the cut & paste job I am no doubt billed for in 6 minute increments. Why don’t lawyers do this? Why can’t we remember that we are human, our clients are human, and we might even be friends.
And, by the way, this letter ensures that our professional relationship will end when my grandmother’s estate is closed.
Well, depersonalizing the letter probably lets him off the hook for anyone claiming later that he showed any kind of favoritism while your grandmother’s estate was being handled. Sometimes business just has to be separated from personal.
I can see merit to both approaches.
The virtue of the sterile letter is that it is disengaged from the emotional event. There is something to be said for separating the mechanical, bureaucratically imposed side of life that lawyers deal with, from the emotional real, human side that we deal with in our social lives.
In a situation like this one where the underlying emotional event isn’t so much a wound as a landmark event, an instinct to depersonalize is probably not a good call, but the instinct to depersonalize is often a useful tool for lawyers. In families on the verge of feud, filled with guilty or despair following a death, or in divorce cases where the emotional causes are hot and ugly and distressing, a “just impersonal business to work through” attitude is often the only way that what must be done can be done.
Thanks for giving me another item to assign to my Interviewing and Counseling students – draft an empathetic opening paragraph. Your post really brings home the lesson that no matter how often you as an attorney have handled a particular matter, don’t forget about the individual human being(s) on the receiving end of your communications!
Summing up my feelings about this attorney in one word – ugh.
But this is not surprising in many ways (outside of your personal relationship, of course) – we know all about the personality types who gravitate to the practice of law, and attempts to bring the human touch into law are relatively new. A different version of this appears elsewhere. For example, I have a colleague who’s writing a piece about writing demand letters, and she’s reading a lot about how your letter should be threateneing and intimidate the other side. Now that’s a great way to start a negotiation.
Oh, Andrea, I’m so sorry that you’ve lost your grandmother. How deeply sad for your family to lose someone who was so special. And I regret to hear that your family’s attorney evidently failed Relationships 101.
Maybe you can blame the lawyer’s law prof though. In December I wrote a post on the human factor in the practice of law, after reading a letter to my local legal rag from an attorney remembering a terrible lesson in a family law class – he was publicly humiliated for showing empathy to a client in a role play:
http://mediationchannel.com/2009/12/09/remembering-the-human-factor-in-the-practice-of-law/
Andrea, I am sorry for your loss. And for the exacerbation of the pain caused by a thoughtless colleague. As a mediator, I was tempted to post a flippant response to Michael’s post, like “What? And put mediators out of businss?!” But sadly, there is no risk of that. Even mediation is becoming more like litigation :o( I just published on article on that topic, if you’d like to see it. Deborah
Brilliant, Andrea.
It’s already got me wondering what an empathetic demand letter might look like. An empathetic subpoena or summons. Etc…