For centuries, solicitors have started correspondence by saying “Dear Sirs”. This venerable practice may now be ended following advice from the Law Society.
The Law Society’s guidance on diversity and inclusion in language has been changed so that the profession is now advised to start letters and emails in a more up to date manner. Saying “Dear Sirs” is a throwback to the time when the legal profession was entirely male.
Instead of saying “Dear Sirs”, the Law Society suggest that we should instead use neutral terms such as ‘Dear legal team’, ‘Dear all’ or simply ‘greetings’ or ‘good morning’. The guidance adds: ‘These alternatives maintain professionalism while ensuring your communication is respective of all gender identities. If you know the person’s name, always use it. If not, keep it simple and neutral rather than overly formal.’
Saying “Dear Sirs” is of course ridiculously old-fashioned. I haven’t used the expression for years. If I don’t know the name of the person to whom I am writing, I usually say “Dear Sir or Madam,” which, let’s face it, covers the vast majority of possible recipients. I appreciate that some people might prefer to addressed nowadays as Mx, but I remain to be convinced that is necessary. Unless someone expressly asks me to address them in that way, I am not going to start using it, or “Dear Sir or Madam or Mx”, for that matter. (While we’re on that subject, I also shall not be joining in the current fashion for putting my preferred pronouns at the end of my emails. I am a 6 foot 2 inch tall, bearded person with a traditionally male first name. If you’re not sure what pronouns to use for me, I suggest that you take a wild guess. I won’t be offended if you get it wrong).
More often than not, I prefer to address correspondence to the actual person with whom I’m corresponding. When writing to solicitors acting for the other side in my cases, I address my letters to them personally, i.e. “Dear Ms Smith” or “Dear Mr Brown”. Unless I know for certain that a female recipient is married and uses their spouse’s surname, I don’t usually use Mrs. When I write to a client’s wife, I generally do address them as “Mrs” as generally I find that is what most married women prefer and my experience is that many married women do not lie to be addressed as Ms. If they have a different surname or are unmarried, I generally use “Ms” (unless they make it clear that they prefer “Miss”).
“Miss” is quite old fashioned though. In France and Germany, official correspondence is apparently no longer addressed to “Mademoiselle” or “Fraulein”; they use “Madame” and “Frau”, even when the recipient is unmarried. Perhaps saying “Miss” should go the same way. I recall women teachers at my school in the seventies and eighties were very clear to us that we should not address them as “Miss”; they wanted to be called Mrs Trunchbull etc. Perhaps saying “Miss” is as old fashioned as its male equivalent, “Master”.
When I was a child, I sometimes received postal orders (if you are under the age of 40, you probably won’t know what a postal order is) from elderly relatives for my birthday, addressed to “Master Jonathan Armstrong”. My late father was known at work as Master Robin when he first started there (to distinguish him from the other Armstrongs there, who were my grandfather, the mill manager, known as Mr Douglas, and his predecessor and my great grandfather who had been known as Mr Samuel. I think that Dad was only promoted to Mr Robin after my grandfather’s death or when he married my mother.
Those were of course much more deferential and formal times. Such terminology went out of fashion along with Homburgs and fob watches.
Shockingly, about 15 or 20 years ago, I started to address people by their first names in correspondence. Clients had stopped addressing me as Mr Armstrong, so I started to call them by their first names. (At around the same time, they stopped turning up to see me wearing a suit and tie; I carried on with ties until Covid, which seemed to do terminal damage to tie wearing).
I also started to address other solicitors by their first names, if I already knew them. If they were new to me, I called them Mr or Ms.
The first name thing was an inevitable byproduct of starting to practice as a collaborative lawyer in 2007. In collaborative law cases, the parties and their lawyers commit to working together or a collaborative, constructive and non-positional way, as well as committing to not litigating their dispute through the court. They try to reach an agreement, with the assistance of their specially trained collaborative lawyers, in face to face meetings, where, outrageously, we all address each other by our first names. The process is very informal. I sometimes used to take my tie off (which in 2007 was quite revolutionary).
Such an approach is designed to assist the parties in reaching an agreement that is in the best interests of both spouses, as well as their children, in a way that enables them to remain amicable and to depart from their marriage in such a way that that they can both feel that a fair outcome has been reached, but that also meets their needs. The process has many advantages over litigation, including being less confrontational, faster than court and less expensive. It enables the parties to keep control over the outcome and to come up with more imaginative solutions than the limited range of out of outcomes that can be imposed by a court.
Using the right language is important. I will always remember a collaborative meeting about 20 years ago where I called the wife “Amanda”. I may have done it more than once. She was finding the whole process challenging and suddenly screamed “Mandy!” at me. Her name was Amanda, but she preferred Mandy. I was mortified and apologised profusely, which would have been fine, had I not then called her Amanda again a few minutes later. (Names have been changed).
The collaborative process is similar to round table negotiation meetings. I have heard it argued that the process is very different to a round table meeting where there is not the same retirement to be work collaboratively, but in my experience where a round table meeting is conducted by solicitors who have undertaken collaborative negotiation training, it tends to be very collaborative in style (sometimes known, controversially, as “collaborative lite”).
Such meetings are nothing like the way in which they tend to be portrayed in TV and movie legal dramas, where it is usually depicted as a point scoring exercise where the solicitors constantly refer to the parties as “my client” or “your client”.
“My client” and “your client” should also be abandoned in correspondence. I still receive letters and emails from solicitors who insist on talking about the parties in this strange pseudo-anonymous manner. Many of those solicitors are quite junior (often they are the ones who insist on telling me what their preferred pronouns are), but who appear to think this is the way it must be done. Twenty odd years ago, I decided to abandon this practice and started to take the radical step of actually referring to the parties by their names. (I sometimes even refer to the parties by their first names, although I will confess that my practice here is not entirely uniform and I often say Mr So and so or Mrs Such and Such instead.
Quite aside from anything else, “Your client” and “Our client” is potentially risky; a simple typo can change “Your” to “Our”, which would make a massive difference in written financial proposals.
This type of correspondence is often couched in a surprisingly Dickensian manner. The writers seem to think that they must use ultra-formal prose, because they are lawyers. Having said that, I now receive some letters that are worded in such an oddly weird and overly formal manner, that I have begun to suspect that AI has been used to draft them.
The Law Society’s guidance to be welcomed. “Dear Sirs” is ridiculously old fashioned, although it will take some people a long time to get used to it. I still occasionally forget that I am not supposed to address district judges in court as “Sir” or “Madam” anymore and that I should call them “Judge”. Part of the reason for that change is that many female judges apparently did not like being addressed as “Madam”; they felt that it had a whiff of the bordello about it.
I’m not entirely sure about some of the Law Society’s suggested alternatives though. “Greetings” just reminds me of Joey Boswell in Bread.
25 October 2025
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