The letter that made you furious: staying regulated when the other side goes on the attack

By Sonja Cilliers and Maryke Swarts, PMRI · 12 September 2026

It arrives at half past four on a Tuesday, which is when these letters tend to arrive. Two pages from the other side, personal in tone, accusing you of a delay that was theirs, questioning your understanding of the rules, and copied to your client. By the end of the first paragraph your face is hot. By the end of the second you have a reply in mind that is precise, devastating and not something you should ever send. Your hand is already on the mouse.

Every practitioner knows this moment, and it does not get gentler with seniority. The candidate attorney who receives her first letter of this kind reads it as a verdict on whether she belongs in the profession. The partner who has been receiving them for twenty-five years still feels the heat in the face, and now has the added sting of the letter being read by the associate who was copied on it. The general counsel who gets one from an outside firm feels it in front of the whole executive. What most practitioners do not know is what has just happened in the brain, and why the reply that feels so right is the one to avoid.

What just happened

An attack on your competence or integrity is processed by the brain as a threat to standing, and for a social species that ranks close to a physical threat. Eisenberger and colleagues showed, using brain imaging, that social rejection activates the same neural circuitry as physical pain, which is why a hostile letter can feel like a blow rather than a disagreement. The amygdala responds within a fraction of a second, well before the reasoning part of the brain has finished reading the first sentence. Adrenaline follows. Blood flow and neurochemical balance shift away from the prefrontal cortex, the region that handles nuance, strategy and tone, and toward the systems built for fighting or fleeing. Amy Arnsten’s review of the research describes how even mild acute stress rapidly impairs prefrontal function, taking the most sophisticated part of the brain offline at exactly the moment it is needed.

The reply you compose in that state is therefore composed by the wrong part of the brain. It will be sharper than the situation needs, it will give the other side something to use, and it will read badly to a judge in six months’ time, when the heat has long gone and only the words remain. Every experienced practitioner has a letter they wish they had not sent, and almost all of them were sent within an hour of receipt. A senior litigator we will call Pieter keeps one of his in a drawer, printed, as a reminder. It was three lines long. It cost his client a costs order and cost him a night’s sleep for a week.

The rule of the second reading

The method is simple, and it works because it respects the biology rather than fighting it. Do not reply on the first reading. Close the letter. Do something unrelated for at least twenty minutes, and longer if the letter was severe, because adrenaline and cortisol take time to clear and no amount of willpower speeds up the chemistry. Take a call on another matter. Walk to the kitchen. Then read the letter again.

The second reading is a different experience, and practitioners who try this are often surprised by how different. The letter is shorter than it seemed. Some of the accusations are vague. One or two of the points, on reflection, are fair, and the fair ones are easier to concede once the threat system has stood down. On the second reading, do one thing before drafting: list, in plain words, what the letter actually says. Not what it implies about you, not its tone, only its content. Most hostile letters, listed in this way, contain one or two points that need an answer and a great deal of noise. The answer addresses the points. The noise is ignored, which is both the professional response and the one that irritates an aggressive opponent most.

Draft the reply with the judge as the reader. Every letter in a litigious matter may end up in a bundle, and a reply that is calm, short and accurate, sitting beneath a letter that is none of those things, does more for your client than any retort could. The contrast is the argument. Where you do need to record a disagreement, do it in one sentence and move on. Where the letter has been copied to your client, a short separate note to the client, explaining that this is a tactic and that the firm will respond in due course and in kind, does more for the relationship than a fast and furious reply ever would.

The longer game

Some opponents use hostility as a tactic precisely because it works. It provokes, it wastes the other side’s afternoon, and it sometimes produces the intemperate reply they were hoping for. Recognising the tactic changes how the letter lands in the body. It is a move on the board rather than a verdict on you, and the practitioner who does not take the bait has already won that exchange, whatever the merits of the matter. Pieter, after the letter in the drawer, adopted a private rule that any correspondence which made him angry was, by definition, working, and that his job was to make it stop working.

There is also a cost that has nothing to do with the matter. A letter that keeps the threat system running for the rest of the afternoon has taken the prefrontal cortex away from every other file on the desk. The opinion that was due at five goes out at seven and is not as good. The associate who came in with a question was answered too quickly. The hostile letter did not only cost twenty minutes; it degraded the quality of the whole afternoon, and it went home in the car. The second reading protects the afternoon as much as it protects the reply.

What firms and leaders can do

Firms can help by making the second reading a norm rather than a private discipline. A partner who says out loud, in the open-plan office, “nobody answers that letter today” has taught a junior more about practice than a year of drafting corrections. The head of a legal department who tells the team that hostile correspondence from outside firms is always held overnight before a reply goes out has removed the pressure that makes juniors fire back at half past four. The rule is easy to state and easy to keep, and it protects the client, the practitioner and the firm’s reputation in the same stroke.

It also protects the leaders themselves. Senior practitioners are, if anything, more exposed, because the letters that reach them are the ones that have already escalated, and because they have the authority to send a reply nobody will check. The second reading is a discipline that gets more valuable the higher up the building it is practised.

PMRI’s The Leadership Dilemma in Law is a recorded webinar that looks at how senior practitioners stay clear-headed under exactly this kind of pressure, and at what a leader’s visible response teaches the people around them. The recorded High-Performance Productivity for Legal Professionals webinar goes into what an afternoon hijacked by the threat system costs in output, and how to get the prefrontal cortex back. PMRI’s talks, masterclasses and short sessions on decision-making under pressure cover the same mechanism for a whole team, with tools that hold on a Tuesday afternoon. All of the material is developed jointly by a behavioural specialist and an advocate with 27 years in practice, who has received a fair number of these letters herself. If you would like to talk about what this looks like in your firm, start a conversation with us. There is no charge for the first one.