Tonight's file is a single line on a page: the demand line. The number. How much should the letter ask for? Demand Letter Files, ninety six point seven. I write demand letters for a living, and no sentence in the letter gets written wrong more often than this one. So tonight, the arithmetic. Four numbers that go into one, and the order in which I compute them. The file opens with a problem. It closes with the leverage the sender actually has, and leverage, in the end, is a number you can defend.

The first number is the legal damages number, and it is the floor everything else stands on. This is not the number that feels right. It is the number a court could actually award on your facts, under your contract, in your jurisdiction. For a broken contract, the usual measure is the value of what you were promised, minus what you actually received, plus the documented losses that flow naturally from the breach, minus what you saved or could have saved by covering elsewhere. Notice how much subtraction there is in that sentence. Clients arrive with addition. The law does a lot of subtraction, and I would rather do the subtraction myself than watch the other side's lawyer do it for me.

There is also a list of things people put into this number that generally do not belong in an ordinary contract case. The hours you personally spent being angry about it. The stress. A punitive multiple because they behaved badly. The decade of future business you are certain you would have had. Some of those can matter in other kinds of claims, on other facts, and that is a conversation for a specific file, not a radio show. In the ordinary business dispute, they are decoration, and the recipient's lawyer strikes them out in their head on the first read. My practice is simple: every dollar in the base number needs a document behind it. If it has no document, it can inform my thinking, but it does not go on the demand line.

Then, interest and attorney fees, and these get handled with gloves. Interest belongs in the demand where a contract sets a late payment rate, or where a statute provides for it on the kind of claim you have. Attorney fees belong where a fee shifting clause or a specific statute says so. Where. That one word is the entire rule. I am not going to quote rates or code sections tonight, because the honest answer depends on your contract and your jurisdiction, and a number pulled from the radio is worth what you paid for it. What I will tell you is the mistake I keep seeing: letters that demand attorney fees when nothing in the contract and nothing in the law provides for them. Opposing counsel spots that instantly, and now the conversation is about your overreach instead of their breach. You handed them the red pen and a reason to use it.

You have reached the Demand Letter Files, on Terms.Law Radio.

The second number is the settlement floor, and it never appears in the letter at all. Privately, before anything is sent, my client decides the number at which they would sign a release tomorrow and go back to running their business. That floor accounts for the cost of continuing: the fees, the months, the attention, the fact that a fight lands your dispute on a stranger's desk for a decision. Nobody but the client and I ever see this number. But it disciplines everything that follows, because a demand drafted without a floor is a wish, and a negotiation entered without a floor is a drift. When a response eventually arrives, good or bad, the floor is what turns it from an emotional event into a math problem.

The third number is negotiation room, and here is where craft replaces feelings. Room is built, not inflated. Built room looks like this: the demand states the full documented damages, computed at the reasonable top of a defensible range, with interest claimed where the contract provides for it, every element itemized. Inflated room looks like a number somebody doubled in the parking lot. The difference is visible on the page. Built room, when the other side works the numbers, compresses gracefully toward your floor through positions you can justify one line at a time. Inflated room collapses, because the first concession reveals that the number was air, and after that every figure in your letter trades at a discount.

The fourth number is the one that goes on the page, and by now it mostly computes itself: the documented damages, plus properly grounded interest and fees, stated precisely and itemized. Not rounded. If the arithmetic comes to eighty one thousand four hundred twelve dollars, the letter says eighty one thousand four hundred twelve dollars, and it shows the addition in a table right there in the text. A computed number reads like a record. A round number reads like a mood. Here is a composite from the files. Two letters, the same kind of dispute, a software build that was delivered and never paid for. The first letter demanded one hundred fifty thousand dollars, flat, no breakdown. The second demanded sixty three thousand two hundred forty dollars: unpaid milestones itemized, cover costs receipted, interest computed under the contract's late clause to the day of the letter. The first letter got read as an opening shout. The second got read as a balance due. Same species of dispute, entirely different conversation afterward, because the second letter left the recipient's lawyer nothing cheap to say. The lazy reply, prove it, had already been answered in the table.

One more discipline before the number ships: the audit. I read the finished demand as if I were the other side's lawyer, line by line, asking one question: which entry would I attack first? If any line makes me wince while I am sitting in that chair, the line gets a document, gets recomputed, or gets cut. A demand with nine defensible lines beats a demand with twelve lines where three are soft, because the soft three are where the entire reply will live. Precision is not decoration on a demand letter. Precision is the message, and the message is: this sender is organized, this sender has counsel, and this number will not fall apart under pressure.

So, the practical conclusion, in order. One: compute the legal damages number with a document behind every dollar, and do the law's subtraction before the other side does it for you. Two: claim interest and fees only where your contract or a statute actually provides for them, and check before you claim, not after. Three: set your private settlement floor before the letter goes out, not after their reply comes in. Four: build negotiation room out of a defensible range, never out of a multiplier. Five: put a computed, itemized number on the demand line and show the math. Six: audit the whole thing from the opposing chair, and cut every line you cannot defend. The number is not the loudest part of the letter. It is the part that gets tested hardest.

If your losses are documented and the dispute is ready for formal escalation, the fixed-fee lawyer-drafted demand letter service is at terms dot law.

That closes tonight's file. The fine print: every story and example you heard tonight, including the two letters, is a fictionalized composite, drawn from patterns across many matters, with all identifying details changed, and never a real client's story. This is general commentary, not legal advice about your situation, no outcome is promised or implied, and listening does not create an attorney client relationship. I'm the AI voice of Terms.Law Radio. The letters themselves are written by Sergei Tokmakov, California attorney. Do the subtraction. Show the math. Good night.