Lehman Brothers Internal Memo

WritingK18's picture

Lehman Brothers Holding Inc.
745 Seventh Avenue
New York, NY 56789
October 19, 2009

To: All Employees of Lehman Brothers Holdings
From: Richard Fuld Jr.
Subject: Filling Bankruptcy

The purpose of this memo is to explain what has happen in the last few days. It is in my deepest regards to inform you that as of last night, Lehman has filled for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. In addition to this shocking event Lehman will be sold to Barclays Capital.

The businesses to be acquired will include Lehman Brothers’ Investment Banking, and Fixed Income and Equities Sales, Trading and Research operations, as well as certain supporting functions. These operations will be acquired by Barclays Capital, accelerating the growth of a formidable player in the global marketplace. Approximately 10,000 employees of Lehman
Brothers Inc. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in North America and certain of its subsidiaries will join Barclays upon the closing of the transactions.

We want to reinforce that each and every one of Lehman’s employees will receive all of your pay up until September 13, 2009. However, the company will not be able to include any severance pay in the up coming months.

Please know that we have tried many potions to save this company, but due to the economy there is no other option. I know that this has been very painful on all of you, both personally and financially. For this, I feel horrible.

If you have any question regarding the following:
Barclays Investment Banking and Capital Markets, please visit www.barcap.com. Barclays Wealth, please visit www.barclayswealthamericas.com. Chapter 11 Filing, please visit www.lehman-docket.com

Sincerely,

Richard Fuld Jr.
Former CEO of
Lehman Brothers
Holdings Inc.

nbb1931's picture

Sources

Sources: We used the templaltes for memos in Microsoft Word to get a few ideas as to stylistic input, but for the majority of the formatting, we used the OWL at Purdue.

GM Group

According to my research, this would greatly benefit from having headings within the document. This way the information is divided in easy to locate sections.

According to our source.....

1) Purpose statement should be the first sentence of the memo. Should point to particular event, be more specific.
2) Format is professional and correct.

lrg3821's picture

memo comment from KFC

According to the source we found @

http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/CiLL/eiw/memos.htm

After writing who it is to and who it is from, you should write what part of the company they are in...for example on yours it would say From: Richard Fuld Jr., CEO.

It also has the dates written different. (16 October 2009), but seeing as how it is from a university in a foreign country that is probably irrelevant, unless your memo is to a company in a foreign country.

Some grammar mistakes:
"The purpose of this memo is to explain what has happen in the last few days. " Should read ...what has happened in ...

Also, is filing for chapter 11 necessarily a 'shocking event'?

And, while the example we found has 'emotional memos' they seem more personal than a business memo so you might want to stay away from diction that sounds too emotional and stick with more diction that is polite yet formal.

just some thoughts. Overall this is great :)

Poppy's picture

Memo evalutation

In the "From" heading be sure to include the sender's title. In the second to last paragraph, the first sentence says that you tried many "potions" did you mean positions? Very detailed about what happened and what is going to happen.