Not A Contest
What is the best advice you received from your parents? What advice will your children remember? What advice would you like your kids to pass along to their children?
The rules are simple. No prizes. Just appreciation from other members of our community of parents. Your recommendation should be concise, and, for extra credit, increase in meaning over time. Post your “Most Meaningful Advice” in the Comments Section at the end of my essay.
Here is my entry: A bad settlement is better than a good lawsuit.
My dad used this phrase after listening to how his clients had been treated unfairly. The contract for the sale of the two-million-dollar house was clear! We had every right to the firewood in the backyard! The law is unequivocal! Only stuff attached to the walls like mounts for televisions has to stay! The buyer wants a thousand dollars to replace those few sticks? They are calling me a thief! I have never been so outraged! I want you to countersue for emotional distress!
My dad would listen patiently as his wronged client pontificated. Then he would look them in the eye and explain, “a bad settlement is better than a good lawsuit.”
Yes, you’re right. You have been treated unfairly, right is on your side, you have a good case. It is indeed hurtful to be called a thief.
But you need to let it go, walk away. It’s not just that the attorney’s fees will cost you more than the thousand dollars, it’s not that the buyers will never apologize, it’s not that they will never take back their unkind words. It’s not even that a thousand dollars is a tiny fraction of the two-million-dollar purchase price. The problem is that the definition of revenge is drinking poison and hoping your adversary will die.
If my dad’s clients were still unclear on being advised against pursuing legal action, he would go on. “Anger is an acid that destroys the container in which it is kept.”
A bad settlement is better than a good lawsuit also applies to the dissolution of relationships, business and personal, connections that have lasted 50 days or 50 years. Some idiot cuts you off in traffic on the expressway. Panicked, you squash your brakes, narrowly avoiding a collision. Your first impulse is to accelerate, follow the offending unsafe driver, to cut them off, flinging your car into the tiny space between them and the vehicle in front, flipping them off, yelling invective out your window.
What do you think will happen if you’re able to catch that rude driver and express your righteous displeasure? You are so right, my fault, I beg your pardon. Words spoken by an affronting driver never.
Or fighting for that last thousand dollars in a divorce settlement involving a million-dollar estate. Family law involves conveying substantial funds to mediators, forensic accountants, and divorce attorneys. Taking 49% rather than 51% of a million dollars of community property is a difference of $20,000. Getting 50% rather than 49% of the $750,000 left after the professionals take their well-earned cut, leaves you with $115,000 less.
Yes, 50% is more than 49%. But $115,000 is significantly more than $20,000. And as an added bonus you get to invest hundreds of hours of meanness and say words on the public record that can never be unsaid.
“It’s the principle of the thing,” my dad’s clients would opine.
“You don’t have enough money to have principles” he would reply.
What did you think was going to happen? That your soon-to-be-ex-spouse was going to say, yes, you’re right, let’s stay married? Or perhaps, I had no idea that you wanted more money because you were so angry about the dissolution of our marriage. Please, let me give you more, how much would you like? The next time those words are spoken will be the first.
Because a bad lawsuit means you’re still fighting, that you can’t let it go. And if you’re still fighting, you’re still attached.
The game is over, the stadium lights are turned off, everyone else has long since left the parking lot. Remaining standing, still screaming about how the ref made a bad call, that the umpire is a bad person, that justice must be served, is not going to change the outcome.
Repeating to your kids that they should do their homework, insisting that they apply to highly-rejective colleges, be who you want them to be rather than who they are, is another example of a bad settlement being better than a good lawsuit. Loving the kids you got—imperfect, messy, inadvertently insensitive—is accepting a bad judgment. Acting as if you can change your kids by yelling, is going ahead with your good lawsuit.
A bad settlement is better than a good lawsuit is my entry for the Most Meaningful Advice Contest. I hope my kids internalized it. I hope they’ll teach it to my grandchildren.
I look forward to reading your submissions in the Comment Section below.