Performance Under Pressure for Legal Professionals
The letter that made you furious: staying regulated when the other side goes on the attack
Sep
It arrives at half past four. Two pages from the other side, personal in tone, accusing you of a delay that was theirs, 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.
Every practitioner knows this moment. What most 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. The amygdala responds within a fraction of a second, well before the reasoning part of the brain has finished reading. Adrenaline follows. Blood flow shifts away from the prefrontal cortex, the region that handles nuance, strategy and tone, toward systems built for fighting or fleeing.
The reply you compose in that state is 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. Every experienced practitioner has a letter they wish they had not sent, and almost all of them were sent within an hour of receipt.
The rule of the second reading
The method is simple and it works because it respects the biology. 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 the adrenaline takes time to clear and no amount of willpower speeds it up. Then read the letter again.
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; its content. Most hostile letters, listed, 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 neither, does more for your client than any retort. Where you do need to record a disagreement, do it in one sentence and move on.
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 can use. Recognising the tactic changes how the letter lands. It is a move, not a verdict on you, and the practitioner who does not take the bait has already won that exchange.
Firms can help by making the second reading a norm rather than a private discipline. A partner who says out loud “nobody answers that letter today” has taught a junior more about practice than a year of drafting corrections.
PMRI’s Leadership Dilemma in Law webinar and the in-firm sessions on decision-making under pressure both cover the mechanism in detail, with tools that hold on a Tuesday afternoon.
If this was useful, there is one like it every month.
One idea, one practical habit, and the month's articles from the PMRI Library. Written for legal professionals under pressure.