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Private and confidential

LAYOUT 2

Opposite is the law firm's reply to the letter from the prospective client in Finland. It shows some more features of a typical legal letter.

Letterhead

The printed letterhead of a firm gives a great deal of information about it.

Type of firm

Most traditional law firms are in fact partnerships. This means that the profits of the firm are shared among its partners in accordance with the terms of their partnership agreement. The partners have joint and several liability in law, which means that if the partnership incurs debts both all the partners together and each individual partner can be sued for repayment of the debts.

The names of the partners are often included in the letterhead, either at the bottom or in a column on either side of the text.

Address

In addition to the address of the office from which the letter is being sent, the letterhead may also give the address of the head office and any branches or other offices the law firm maintains.

Telephone and fax numbers will also be included. The majority of law firms nowadays also use email and maintain a website, in which case these will also be included.

References

References are often quoted to indicate what the letter refers to (Your ref.) and the correspondence to refer to when replying (Our ref.). The majority of law firms use references to identify

1) the writer of the letter,

2) the client about whom they are writing, and

3) the number of the case.

Firms usually adopt a relatively simple system for identifying client and case in the reference. For example, in the reference RJ/SMIT.10-3:

RJ identifies the lawyer handling the case -perhaps Richard Jones, for example SMIT means clients whose surnames begin with SMIT (e.g. Smith)

10 identifies a particular client named Smith

3 identifies the third matter that the firm has handled for this client

 

Per pro

The abbreviation p.p. sometimes appears in signature blocks. It means per pro, i.e. for and on behalf of, and is used when someone - often an assistant or secretary - signs a letter on behalf of a colleague.

Enclosures

If there are any documents enclosed with a letter, although these may be mentioned in the body of the letter, it is also common to write Enc. or Encl. below the signature block. If there are a number of documents, these may be listed, e.g.:

Enc.

1Draft contract

2Licensing agreement

3Power of attorney

Private and confidential

This phrase may be written at the head of a letter and, more important, on the envelope -often in the top left-hand corner, in cases where the letter is intended to be read only by the addressee. There are many variations of this phrase, e.g. Confidential, Strictly confidential, To be opened by the addressee only- but there is little difference in meaning between these phrases.

In practice, all lawyers and their staff are under a professional duty of strict confidentiality in relation to their client's affairs. Most law firms have in-house procedures that govern how incoming post is dealt with. Frequently, all incoming post is sorted by a member of staff (or, in a larger firm, a small team of staff) according to established rules. Typically, these may be as follows:



—All envelopes addressed simply to the firm
as a whole are opened, and the contents are
transferred to individual recipients, either

a) on the basis of the reference quoted in the
letter, or

b) where there is no reference, as in a new enquiry, according to the type of legal matter indicated by the contents.

—All envelopes addressed to individuals are
transferred to individual recipients unopened.

Therefore, in most cases writing Private and confidential on the envelope simply acts as an extra safeguard of confidentiality.

Copies

When copies are sent to people other than the named recipient, c.c. (carbon copy) is added at the end of the letter, before the name of the recipient / s of the copies, e.g.:

c.c. Messrs Turner, Jones, Smith & Co

Sometimes you will not want the named recipients to know that other people have received copies. In this case, b.c.c. (blind carbon copy), and the name / s of the recipient / s, are added on the copies themselves, although not, of course, on the top copy. These abbreviations are also used in emails and faxes, and mean exactly the same thing.

The reference to 'carbon copies' is strictly anachronistic, and relates to the time when official correspondence was produced on typewriters in three copies, each of a different colour. This method of producing correspondence disappeared when word-processing techniques became standard, but the convention of referring to carbon copies remains in use as described above.

 


Date: 2016-01-14; view: 928


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