Complaint
The psychology of legal relations
|
When someone complains you have a choice: you can overreact or underreact.
If you overreact—apologising and making amends with a fulsomeness out of all proportion with the original offence—you more or less oblige the complainer to step back: “Oh it is nothing. I am sorry to have raised it.” The aggrieved customer may then profess to be more delighted with his experience than he might have had the inconvenience never arisen. You have made lemonade out of lemons.
On the other hand, if you are peremptory: if you blow the complainant off with a half-hearted redress, you invite him to a place of great moral dudgeon. He will thereafter stop at nothing to pursue and enforce to the letter his rights, to salve his outrage, however consequential the inconvenience may originally have been.
Where this leaves James N Bailey, General Counsel of the Cleveland Stadium Corp, I do not know. But I do know I like his style.