Sharp Dressed Man

One of the weird things about the law these days is that the more formally dressed a lawyer you see walking down the street, the more likely that lawyer belongs to a lower tier / smaller firm. (No, I'm not going to go into the whole messy issue of whether small firms are necessarily lesser quality firms, etc.)

See, back during the big dot-com boom, almost all of the BigLaw gave into business casual. You look like a chump trying to court the black t-shirt and jeans start up crowd in a conservative navy blue Brooks Brothers suit. So, lawyers (mostly transactional) started adopted a more relaxed look to fit in with the clients. BigLaw caved, and instituted a firm-wide relaxation in dress code which has yet to be repealed even after the big bust.

SmallLaw, on the other hand, their bread and butter were clients outside the tech or emerging companies sector. Their typical client assumed lawyers were going to wear the suit and tie. So, sitting in the Century City Shopping Center food center, that twenty-something dude in the Gap khakis and denim button up is probably making $40K more than that twenty-something dude in the $700 black suit, $70 white shirt and $80 burgundy tie.

I guess this is a roundabout way that the firm for which I've started working today requires suit and tie.