Womble Partner: Suit-Wearing Lawyers Earn More?
Pressly Millen.
Courtesy of Pressly Millen.
As the big debate over appropriate office attire for a lawyer continues to rage, Womble Carlyle partner Pressly M. Millen decided to weigh in with his own observations of the evolution of attorney dress over the past 25 years and explains why, “My suit is my uniform.”
On Wall Street, where Millen started, attire was rigidly tailored. All suits were gray and blue. The more edgy of the set would wear “semi-loud suspenders.” And light-colored khaki suits were only to be worn in summer.
The good news back then was that there were no “what do I wear this morning?” dilemmas. “The legal wardrobe may have been a bit stultifying in those early years, but no time was wasted on any morning agonizing over what to wear,” Millen notes in an opinion piece published by the National Law Journal.
The stultifying ’80s turned on its head in the ’90s during the “Internet Bubble.” None of the young entrepreneurial clients wore ties and neither did their lawyers, Millen notes.
And that’s where attire, according to Millen, slid down the slippery slope from “Casual Fridays to Casual Every Day” to a state of “fashion confusion.”
Throughout, Millen says he held firm to his suits, armed with the argument that he is a litigator and needs to look the part.
“For me … the calculus has been simple,” Millen writes. “I just couldn’t imagine too many clients willing to pay more than $500 an hour for legal advice to a guy wearing a knit shirt who looked as if he were going to hit the links as soon as this damn meeting was over.”
