[QUOTE=Big Bad Voodoo Lou]
My work takes me to several different law firms every week, and I can tell you that most attorneys wear a button-down shirt and khakis to the office unless they’re going to meet with clients, and only then do they opt for suits and ties. As usual, conservative gray or navy suits are the most common, with white or blue shirts and relatively plain red or striped ties. But if they can get away with it, attorneys greatly prefer to show up to work in polo-type shirts tucked into khakis or even nice jeans.
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This isn’t my experience either and I work in a large corporate firm in the Wall Street area.
The lawyers at my firm generally wear the standard conservative suit-and-tie ensemble. Granted, if they’re not seeing clients, the jacket tends to come off and the tie gets loosened pretty quickly, but never so far that it couldn’t be restored to full conservative suit-and-tie-ensemble glory in a jiffy. I can only think of one attorney I’ve ever seen in the office who was wearing khakis and a polo shirt - and he’s, well, a special case.* I see a lot of them in suit-slacks and a nice tailored shirt with or without a tie - but always the sort of look you get when the person wore their full-on suit to the office this morning and has been nibbling away at the least-comfortable bits for a couple of hours, if you see what I mean. The sort of thing that just screams “I can be fully suited up in less than 5 minutes and you’d never know it!”.
The female attorneys all wear the girl version of the standard conservative suit-and-tie look in some iteration. Hose, pumps, tailored pantsuit or skirt suit. They have a little more leeway - but mostly only because there’s a little more flexibility with the girl version of the standard conservative suit-and-tie look.
Even when the retired and semi-retired partners and counsel come into the office, they still wear the conservative suit-and-tie ensemble. And in most cases they’re only coming into the office to have lunch with old friends.
And our office is ostensibly “business-casual”. The polos and khakis thing just isn’t done, at least by the attorneys. Most of the support staff does it, though.
*For starters, he’s a specialist (domestic and international tax ramifications of mergers and acquisitions). Also, he’s in permanent advancement limbo (too valuable to get the nudge out the door at year-eight like the associates, but they don’t want to make him a partner because they have enough tax partners). There’s not a chance he could get fired - he’s too good, and he’s the principal assistant of the head of the tax department, who is an epically huge pain in the ass to work for (I should know, he’s my boss, too). Even he wears the suit-and-tie deal if he’s going to be meeting clients in the flesh, though. In fact, I keep an eye on his wardrobe to know whether or not there are client meetings planned because my boss is abyssmal at letting me know these things in advance. Polo shirt = no in-the-flesh meetings, tie = I can expect clients in the office.
