Handwritten mail for professional services firms

What the letter says, by profession

The four moments above are common to every firm. What goes in the letter is not, and a note that could have been sent by an accountant, a lawyer or a consultant interchangeably is one nobody will remember receiving.

Law firms

The matter-completion letter is the one that matters and the one most often skipped, because the file closes and everyone moves on. Write it after the final invoice, from the partner who ran the matter, and say something only someone who was there could say. Do not ask for anything. A client who has just finished a difficult matter is not a lead, and treating them as one is how firms lose the referral they were about to get. Keep anything confidential off the page entirely - the letter should be safe to leave on a kitchen bench.

Accounting firms

The structural problem is that compliance-only clients appear once a year, and a relationship built on one transaction is easy for someone else to take. The useful letter is not at lodgement - it is three or four months later, when nobody is chasing anything, mentioning one thing you noticed that they might want to think about before next year. That letter is how a compliance client becomes an advisory one, and it is worth considerably more than the note costs.

Consultants and agencies

Engagements end cleanly and then contact stops, which is why so much consulting revenue comes from re-engaging past clients rather than winning new ones. A note six months after a project closed - referencing what was implemented, not asking for work - reopens more conversations than a follow-up email sent the week the invoice cleared. The reactivation page covers the arithmetic of writing to people who have already bought once.

The referral note, which applies to all of them

Someone put their own reputation behind you. The note should go from the partner who received the work, within a week, and it should name the person referred rather than thanking them for “the referral”. Write it whether or not the referral converted - the ones sent after a referral that went nowhere are the ones that produce the next three.

What we will not pretend

We do not write the copy. For a regulated profession that matters: whatever the letter says about advice, outcomes or your services is yours, and your own professional and advertising obligations apply to it exactly as they would to anything else you send. We write what you supply and we will tell you if something reads oddly, but we are not a compliance check.

We also cannot imitate a named partner’s handwriting, and would not offer to. The signature is a separate question with its own answer - how signatures work - and the short version is that a partner signs the sign-off block themselves or it is written in our hand, clearly.