Simplify Your Workflow with the Best Bill Letter Format for Legal Needs

Bill letter format for Legal

hi do you need to make a legal demand of someone give me five minutes and I'm going to show you how to do it right hi this is attorney Jeremy Hogan and welcome to legal briefs so today we're gonna be talking about a demand letter and a demand letter is simply a formal demand that someone or something stop doing something so in theory a demand letter is very easy to do actually you could just scribble something on the napkin hand it to the person and that's a demand letter but a well done demand letter requires thought and professionalism okay first let's talk about the technical issues often a written demand is a condition proceeding to legal action and you may need to prove sometimes years later when the letter was sent in to whom so at the top of the letter you're always going to start off with the date and then how the letter was sent by u.s. mail email hand delivery facsimile whatever it might be if you send a letter by mail there is a rebuttable presumption that the recipient received it this was decided by the US Supreme Court a long time ago but why rely on a rebuttable presumption if you don't have to instead you should always send your letters either by mail with proof of receipt or even easier what I like to do nowadays by email or facsimile that way if the recipient denies receiving the letter you have some proof that you sent it next always think that your letter will someday be put on a big overhead projector that everyone in a courtroom will be looking at it than looking at you than looking at it so make sure you stay professional and factual don't say anything that's going to embarrass you later you know years later down the road now as to the substance the format of a demand letter is always the same first you make your demand right away tell them what you want right in the first paragraph then you tell the recipient the legal basis of your demand and then at the end you reiterate your demand with a time limitation for the recipients action now that's the basics so the basics are easy I mean the most important thing is to think about your evil enemy that you're writing to and get into his or her head your goal is to get the recipient to do something and sometimes you want to threaten them sometimes you want to control them sometimes you want to even empathize with them so your letter needs to be tailored to who your recipient is so it's really the tailoring of your letter to who the recipient is where the art and the magic are okay so I'm going to give you two examples so you can see exactly how different these things can be the first is a seasoned assist letter that I wrote for bankruptcy clients who are still being contacted by collections prior to filing now this letter is a notice type of letter and a condition proceeding also it's also being written to a debt collector which is a business so the point here is to be very clear and concise no need to say too much we say point link the purpose of the letter right in the first sentence stop all contact with me in the second paragraph we tell them how they can they contacted us and in the third paragraph is the legal basis of the demand and the last paragraph is the demand and the consequence of failure to cease contact so this is not a nice letter and it doesn't have to be as being sent to a collection agency now if you are writing a letter to your neighbor to cease trespassing on your property for example you'd want the tone to be somewhat different more informal and more reasonable a much softer tone now going back to our season desist letter briefly it's a good example because it gives you the elements of a good demand letter start with what you want stop contacting me next state the basis for what you want federal law and last again make your demand and specify the time limitation for doing so stop calling immediately stop calling right away so now let's look at a personal injury demand and you can see how exactly how different it is while maintaining the same framework our season desist letter was one-page this is a letter to a adjuster demanding on a personal injury case and it's 12 pages long this is a letter to the adjuster the adjuster is just doing a job hasn't done anything wrong the purpose of the tone in a personal injury demand letter is to convey that we know our case and detail and know what it's worth while being cordial being a jerk to an adjuster is almost never a good thing don't do it this demand letter is almost 12 pages long and I'll explain why insurance adjusters nowadays are tied to computer programs as far as settling cases they input treatment codes and diagnosis codes and the computer then does whatever a computer does and give them a settlement range so my job in our letter is not just to demand money but to help the adjuster get the computer to give us the money so you're going to see that throughout the letter we break out all the codes that the adjuster will have to input we basically do their job for them to make it easier for to pay us a lot of money and when we started helping the adjusters like this about two or three years ago our Red's settlement value went up 10 to 20% so what I'm trying to show you is that it's not always about harsh demand language but really about knowing your audience and in this case what we want to do is we want to help the adjuster help us and it has worked like magic but the basics are always going to be the same so take a look at this letter we start on the first page saying what we want we want you guy go to pay your policy limits to us on page 2 we talk about liability which is the legal basis for recovery and we list and add up all the bills on page 3 we tell our clients future medical needs followed by all the ICD and CPT codes for all treatment then we give us a synopsis of injuries on page 4 and then on pages 5 to 9 we break out each injury by each body part why because that is how the adjuster software does it so we have 100% tailored our demand letter to how the computer system looks at a case finally we include duties under duress on page 10 because we know that has an extra screen for that and it gets us extra money and then we conclude with our demand for Pretender of the policy limits which must occur within 30 days which is our time frame so between this demand letter and the non-contact letter you can see the difference that knowing your recipient makes these are two very different letters but they're both demand letters okay and there you have it that's the basics of writing a good demand letter and finally I want to leave you with something maybe a little more fun I'm gonna leave you with a demand letter that Budweiser the demand page sent to a small brewery who made a beer which they called the dilly dilly and bud at the time was using dilly dilly in their commercials so they wanted really wanted the brewery to stop using the word dilly dilly but they kept in mind who the recipient of the message was and how this would look if it was on a big screen in front of a jury and they sent their page to make the demand and he forgot to put in his time demand but otherwise I thought it was spot-on so I can joy here knee [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] for the Super Bowl and game to watch the festivities and enjoy a few Bud Lights [Music] [Applause]