Glossary
BIFF.
BIFF stands for Brief, Informative, Friendly, Firm. It is Bill Eddy's four-word framework for written communication with a high-conflict ex, family member, or co-parent. It is the operating standard for grey-rock written exchanges and is widely used in family-law practice for cases involving a personality-disordered party.
Audio readout.
Definition
Bill Eddy is a family-law attorney, therapist, and co-founder of the High Conflict Institute. His 2011 book BIFF: Quick Responses to High-Conflict People articulates the framework that has since become the de facto written-communication standard for high-conflict cases. The acronym is intentionally simple — the value is in the discipline of applying it under emotional pressure, not in the cleverness of the framework itself.
Brief
One to three sentences where possible. Five at the absolute outside. Longer responses give the recipient more material to misread, misquote, or repurpose. Brief responses also signal that the writer is not invested in extended exchange.
Informative
Focused on real information — logistics, decisions, timelines, factual responses to factual questions. Not on emotional content. Not on rebuttals to insults or accusations. The informative content is what the message is for; everything else is what the message declines to be for.
Friendly
Pleasantly neutral, not warm. Greetings are normal. Tone is even. Avoiding sarcasm, accusation, lecture, and contempt — even when these are deserved — preserves the survivor's record and removes the emotional material that a high-conflict ex would otherwise use against them in litigation. “Friendly” here does not mean affectionate; it means the absence of hostility.
Firm
Clear, decided, ending in a way that does not invite extended back-and-forth. A BIFF reply closes a topic. It does not say “maybe” when the answer is no; it does not reopen what has been settled; it does not negotiate against itself.
Why it works
BIFF works because it removes the emotional handle that high-conflict communication is structured to find. The high-conflict party is, often unconsciously, looking for material to react to — anything in the survivor's response that can be quoted out of context, framed as aggression, or used to demonstrate the survivor's instability to outsiders. BIFF responses do not supply that material. Over time, in high-conflict cases that go to court, the survivor's BIFF-disciplined written record becomes one of the most useful pieces of evidence available: a contemporaneous documentation of the survivor being repeatedly reasonable in response to repeated provocation.
Where this appears on the site
BIFF is the recommended standard throughout the recovery and legal-context material: at recovery/grey-rock as the practical content of written grey-rock; in the family-court article as the operating standard for any survivor in litigation; in the male-survivor article in the legal-layer recommendations. Bill Eddy's BIFF and Splitting are listed at resources/books.
