22nd March, 2009 - Ten Things I Hate About My Job #8

I hate Letters of Engagement. It is now a rule laid down by my professional organisation that I need to send one of these to every single client for every single new piece of business. The theory is very sound – you ought to tell your client at the start of each case what you are doing for them , and how much it will cost.

However, in practice these letters have grown enormous. They are full of smallprint and provisos and jargon. In the old days – about 5 years ago – a client asked you to do a job and you did it for them. It does not seem to me that we need 8 pages of bumph to say: “You have asked us to buy your house. We will do it for you. If we make a mess of it, you can sue us.” I imagine that most intelligent people can work that out for themselves. They seemed to manage reasonably well for several centuries.

However, we have a word processor, and we’re gonna use it.