Nasty legal letter? Don’t despair - The Globe and Mail

The next few columns are designed for small-business owners who find themselves on the receiving end of one of those nasty letters from lawyers threatening action if “something” isn’t done immediately.

It may be about money. It could be about performance required by a contract. It might be a “cease-and-desist” letter, demanding that certain conduct must stop or “serious consequences” will follow that involve “going to court.”

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Poll Have you ever received a letter threatening legal action?

The letters sometimes end with the ubiquitous sentence “govern yourself accordingly,” which many of us in the legal community consider a three-word oxymoron and a tired cliché. Why lawyers continue to use it baffles me.

To those of you with such a letter in your hands: don’t despair too much. Unless it’s a bank or another financial institution, a big company oozing with wayward dollars to spend on lawyers, or a party exercising its security on your assets, sometimes it’s just theatre because the guy paying the lawyer to write the nasty letter isn’t prepared to follow through and go to court.

Lawyers are far too expensive. Court is too time consuming. The law is too uncertain. The facts are in dispute. The principal of the plaintiff is a bad witness. And it might take months if not years to get a trial date.

So in small commercial disputes, a lawyer’s letter may be “strategic bluster” more than anything else. Or it might be the opening salvo in a very expensive lawsuit. The key is to know which it is.

Let me explain, while emphasizing that these letters shouldn’t be ignored just because you read a column on the subject by a lawyer in The Globe and Mail. You’ll have to get your own lawyer who will give you advice based on the particular set of facts and how the law applies to them.

My goal here is to look at lawyer’s letters in some context for small-business owners who aren’t in the habit of receiving them.

First and foremost, a lawyer’s letter is meant to send a message. E-mail exchanges and unpleasant phone conversations may have gone back and forth between one party and the other to a point where a message must be sent. That message is: “We’re serious now. We’ve hired a lawyer.”

But sometimes, the message is really this: “We’re more serious than we were, and we‘re hoping that paying a lawyer $300 to write this letter on expensive legal letterhead will intimidate you enough to give us what we want.”

So while you’re waiting for your own lawyer to return your phone call or your e-mail, inspect the letter. Is the allegation or claim so generic and devoid of specifics that it looks like the lawyer “whipped it off” quickly to save the client money? Or is the claim so trumped up and exaggerated that the letter is laughable if it weren’t so annoying and time consuming to respond to?

Better yet, has the lawyer done his or her homework and identified you and your company or your business correctly? Mistakes in your identity or the identity of your business suggest appropriate corporate searches haven’t been done – perhaps because the other side isn’t prepared to pay for them.

What about the lawyer who wrote the letter? Google the lawyer and the firm, and you might discover the writer is a sole practitioner who doesn’t specialize in commercial disputes and doesn’t go to court. That lawyer would have to refer the file to another lawyer if the issue wasn’t resolved. Or you might discover the lawyer signing the letter has a reputation as a “take-no-prisoners pit bull” litigator, which is a useful fact if you’re doubting the other side’s resolve. The messenger may be part of the message.

How much is in dispute? If it’s $25,000 or less in provinces such as B.C., Alberta and Ontario, the claim falls within the monetary jurisdiction of the “small claims courts.” Those are descendants of what used to be called the Court of Requests in medieval England – the concept being that small monetary matters could be heard and resolved relatively quickly with an informal procedure that needn’t involve expensive lawyers. That is, parties are able (and indeed encouraged) to handle the claim themselves, saving legal fees.

My experience in B.C. is that some litigants will actually reduce a $30,000 or $40,000 claim to $25,000 just to be within the jurisdiction of Small Claims Court and handle the claim themselves, without using the expensive discovery procedures in the higher courts. The money they give up in the claim, they notionally save by not spending the legal fees they would have spent in the higher courts.