What actually makes a demand letter get paid

An adjuster gives your demand somewhere between four and fifteen minutes. Most of what lawyers labour over in a demand letter is read by nobody. Here is what the reader is actually doing with it.

A demand letter is not a brief and it is not persuasion in the way a closing argument is persuasion. It is a document that one person, with a queue, reads in order to justify a number to a supervisor. Almost every weakness in a bad demand comes from writing it for the wrong reader.

The reader is not the defendant. It is not a judge. It is an adjuster with authority up to some figure, who has to open a file, form a view, and either settle within their range or push it up the chain with a note explaining why.

What that reader is doing

They are answering four questions, roughly in this order:

• Is liability actually contested, or is this a damages argument dressed up?
• What are the hard numbers — and which of them are documented rather than asserted?
• What does this look like in front of a jury if it does not settle?
• Is this lawyer going to try it, or is this a volume shop that always takes the first offer?

Every paragraph that does not help answer one of those is decoration. Elegant decoration sometimes, but decoration.

The standard mistakes

Four, in rough order of how much money they cost:

• Burying the specials. If the adjuster has to hunt for the medical total, assemble it from three paragraphs, or reconcile two different figures you have given, you have made their job harder in a document whose only purpose is to make it easier.
• Outrage instead of facts. "The defendant’s conduct was egregious and shocking" moves nothing. The dated sequence that lets the reader reach that conclusion themselves moves a great deal. Adjusters are professionally immune to adjectives and highly responsive to chronologies.
• Padding the authority. Six pages of black-letter negligence law tells an experienced adjuster that you had six pages to fill. It also buries the two facts in your file that are genuinely bad for them.
• Numbers the record does not support. This is the expensive one. One figure the adjuster can disprove from the records you attached reprices the entire letter, because now every other number is a question rather than a fact.

That last one deserves its own paragraph

A demand letter is a credibility instrument before it is anything else. The adjuster has the same records you do. If your letter says the treatment gap was two months and the records show six, you have not made an argument they will rebut — you have told them your numbers need checking, and they will check all of them.

The failure is rarely dishonesty. It is that the letter was drafted from an intake summary, or from a chronology built in month two, or from the last demand in a similar case, and the underlying record moved since. Nobody re-read two thousand pages before it went out, because nobody has time to re-read two thousand pages before every letter goes out.

Which is the actual mechanism behind most underpaid demands: not bad lawyering, but a document that has drifted from the file it is supposed to describe.

What a strong one looks like structurally

• The number, and what it is composed of, in the first half page. Not at the end as a reveal.
• A dated chronology. Dense, plain, sourced. This is the part that does the persuading, and it is the part most letters are thinnest on.
• Damages separated into documented and claimed, visibly. Marking the line yourself is a credibility move — it says you know which is which, and it makes the documented column harder to argue with.
• The bad facts, handled in one short paragraph. They know them. A letter that pretends otherwise reads as a letter written by someone who has not finished reading.
• Liability authority: short, and only where liability is genuinely contested.
• A deadline that will actually be enforced. Adjusters have a long memory for lawyers whose deadlines pass without consequence.

A test before it goes out

Take the finished letter and, for every factual assertion in it, find the page in the record that establishes it. Not "that is in the medical records somewhere" — the page.

Three things fall out, and all three are worth knowing before the adjuster finds them:

• Assertions that trace cleanly. Most of them, in a good letter.
• Assertions nothing in the file supports. Usually they came from the client, which is fine as long as you know that is what they are, because that is the first thing defence will test.
• Assertions the record actively contradicts. Rare, and the single most expensive thing that can be in a demand letter.

Most firms do a version of this already for the biggest cases, and skip it on the routine ones — which is reasonable, because done by hand it is a full day. The routine ones are also where the drift accumulates quietly, year after year.

Luma runs that check against the matter’s own documents and reports each assertion as supported, not found, or contradicted, with the conflicting language quoted. It does not rewrite the letter. The point is that you see the list before the adjuster does.