The Nicest Email I Got This Week Came From Opposing Counsel

Last reviewed October 2, 2026

This week, as a matter wrapped up, the lawyer on the other side — the one whose job, for as long as we’d been at this, was to tell me no — sent me a closing note: “Great — it was nice working with you on this. Let me know if you need anything else from me!”

I read it twice. Then I sat with an odd feeling for a minute before I could name it. The feeling was surprise, and the reason it was surprise is the point of this post: an email like that does not happen every day in this work. It should.

Why a two-line pleasantry stopped me cold

By the time a student or a family hires me, the dispute has usually been running for months without a lawyer anywhere near it. I have read a lot of those files, and they tend to look the same: emails to a dean that never got answered, a meeting that ended with “we’ll circulate this and follow up,” a committee letter citing a policy section nobody can locate, and a parent at midnight drafting a message to the provost, deleting it, and drafting it again. The temperature is high because one side of the dispute is a person and the other side is a building.

Then the matter ends, and the last document in the file is a thank-you note from the institution’s lawyer. Of course that feels strange. But strange is the wrong reaction. That email is what the process looks like when it works.

Why is lawyer-to-lawyer better than student-to-faculty?

Think about what a student is actually doing when they fight an institution alone. They are arguing with the people who grade them, evaluate their professionalism, write their recommendation letters, and sit on the committees that will decide their future. Every email risks a relationship they still need. And the people on the receiving end are educators, not dispute-resolution professionals — challenged in their own building, they take it personally, get defensive, and close ranks. Student to faculty is the worst possible channel for a dispute, and it is the channel almost every dispute starts in.

Move the same dispute lawyer to lawyer, and the physics change:

• The student gets to go back to being a student. The professor keeps teaching; the dean keeps deaning. The lawyers carry the conflict so the people who still have to see each other in the hallway don’t have to.
• The dispute gets defined. “Please give my son another chance” becomes: here is the policy provision, here is the evidence, here is the specific decision we are asking for, and here is when it has to happen. An institution can ignore a plea. It is much harder to ignore a defined position.
• Everything runs on clocks and in writing — stated deadlines, plain positions, nothing that needs decoding. That discipline, oddly, is what keeps the temperature down.

Knowing when to push — and when not to

Here is the part of the job nobody puts on a website. Advocacy is not a volume knob turned to maximum. Some moments call for the hard letter. Others call for letting a committee finish its work, taking yes for an answer, or holding a point in reserve because spending it now would cost more than it wins. A student in the middle of their own case cannot make those calls — there is too much at stake, and they are standing too close to it. Part of what you hire, when you hire a lawyer, is someone whose judgment is not on fire: someone who knows when to push and, just as importantly, when not to.

Courtesy and respect go a long way

One more thing made this week’s email land. The lawyer who sent it and I will almost certainly never be on a matter together again — different institutions, different states, students I haven’t met yet. This was not the small-town bar where the same two lawyers face each other every month and politeness is an investment. There was nothing to gain by being gracious. They were gracious anyway.

And none of that courtesy was softness — not theirs and not mine. We disagreed where we had to, in writing, plainly. What the mutual respect did was keep the disagreement about the issue instead of the people. Courtesy between counsel is not a concession. It is one of the reasons matters end.

What happens after a matter like this closes?

Here is the quiet part, and it is more common than people assume: when an issue is raised the right way — specific, documented, professional — institutions rarely just close the file and move on. A process that produced a problem tends to get looked at. A handbook section gets rewritten, a deadline gets clarified, a committee adds a step, so the next student doesn’t hit the same wall. Nobody sends a press release about it. But raising a problem properly is often how a school’s process gets better, and that outlasts any one case.

Is it always like this?

No, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Some matters are a fight from the first letter to the last, and my job does not change when they are — some weeks end in an all-nighter instead of a thank-you note. No lawyer can promise you a courteous opponent, and no honest lawyer promises outcomes at all. What I can tell you from the files: disputes handled lawyer to lawyer get defined instead of inflamed, and defined disputes can end. Undefined ones just keep going, and they take semesters and health with them.

One thing I’m leaving out on purpose

You’ll notice I haven’t named the matter, the school, or the lawyer. That’s on purpose, and it’s permanent. What happens in a client’s case stays in that client’s case — and if you ever hire me, the same rule protects yours.

What should a student or parent take from this?

Not “be nicer to the school.” You can be perfectly polite and still be ignored; politeness alone was never the variable. The channel is the variable — and so is the judgment about when to press and when to hold.

But here is the truth underneath all of it: at the end of the day, a school and its students should have the same goals. The school wants to graduate capable, qualified people; the student wants to become one. Nobody enrolls planning to end up in a dispute, and no institution writes a handbook hoping to use the dismissal chapter (well, it does seem like some do). Most of the time the two sides never stopped sharing a goal — they just stopped being able to see it through the paperwork. It takes a little reminder sometimes.

So get the reminder in early — before positions harden, before an appeal window quietly closes, before the record fills up with midnight emails you would rather not see quoted back to you. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and in this work the ounce usually looks like a lawyer’s letter sent while there is still something to talk about.

If you are in the middle of one of these — a dismissal letter, a hearing notice, an accommodation fight that keeps going in circles — the place to start is a Full Read + Game Plan: you send me the entire file, I read all of it, and we build the plan together. Or just reach out and tell me what arrived in your inbox. Either way, my goal is the one this week’s email reminded me of: get your dispute to an ending — ideally the kind where the last message in the file is a kind one.