Well, colour me surprised. This is the first c&d I have come across that actually improves my opinion of the entity releasing it. Thank you for posting this.

It really is excellent. I have to wonder why they aren't all like this. It costs no more to write a nice letter like this one than a mean one as is the standard, and surely they'd realize this approach gets better results!

Some of the better lawyers do work like this, when possible. This is not the only example I've seen, though I can't seem to find easy examples offhand as it's been a while since I saw one like this.

The sad thing is that a lot of people demand an aggressive lawyer and some even brand themselves this way, especially on TV ("we'll _fight_ for you!") so you end up with lots of "attack dog" lawyers, sadly.

A lot of engineers write needlessly aggressively too. Our own Linus Torvalds is famous for it. I too am guilty of this from time to time. It's not a problem unique to lawyers -- humans like to display their power, real or perceived, to "enemies," and it takes a conscious effort to overcome that tendency.

I have to agree with this. I used to be overly aggressive (I still have a tendency towards this state of being), but I've found its completely counter productive. I recently had a major service completely stop working, and I couldn't get hold of the remote development team to fix it.

I had my manager escalate to half the world, but we only did it to get their attention as it literally stopped the Australian side of the business cold - it was an existential threat to our business, and I wasn't about to let it happen. However, once the development team started working on the issue (with upper management on their case), I deliberately ratcheted down the pressure.

I did this by stopping all emails from being cc'ed to managers, and I acknowledged that the team working on the project were under pressure but that my only goal was to get a fix and frankly I wasn't interested in blame, only a result. When I took out the managers from the email I also told the devs that I appreciated their work, and from this point I'd work with them cooperatively, and that I would give them space to deal with the problem without constant distractions from managers asking for updates.

The dev team worked on the issue and fixed it a few hours before the start of the business day and I verified the fix. Then I sent an email to their team acknowledging the fix, and the effort they had put into it - only at this point I copied all the orginal managers to the email.

Yesterday I discovered the dev team had done a review of every case I'd ever opened to them, found some additional problems which they fixed without me asking, and then ensured all open cases got a status update and were being actively worked on.

You capture more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. And I felt pretty good!

I agree it's excellent, but I don't know how you can say

>It costs no more to write a nice letter like this one than a mean one as is the standard

when the letter includes a literal offer to transfer cash to its recipient to cover their redesign costs. So yes, it does cost more than any other type of letter :)

It still sounds pretty good.

That's true, but it would almost definitely be a lot cheaper than paying more laywers.

Non-legal remedies are almost ALWAYS what people want.

That's fair. The letter would still be friendly and effective without that offer, though.

I love how the C&D letter is used as a selling point on the book's Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Piano-President-Patrick-Wensink...