Web Resources for Dress Codes for Business Casual or Dress Down Fridays
By Rita Kaiser - Reference Services Librarian
Attorneys--you can recognize them by the way they dress. Look for conservative suit and tie for the men, skirted suits or pantsuits for the women plus relatively short hair if a male, or neat hair if a female. Attorneys appear to have a specific dress code. While attorneys have followed the lead of the software and dot com world, with “business casual” and “casual Fridays” becoming leading trends in the late 1990s, they still wear suits for court appearances, meeting with clients, and more. Law students still look for advice on how to dress properly for that interview and what “business casual” really means when they join a firm. Briefly, here are some internet resources for those questions.
When looking for advice on what to wear for “business casual” days, start at www.law.com. You can search the last six months of articles and in an advanced search a range of dates. Surprisingly, you will even find an article about a judge in Georgia who has instituted a courtroom casual Friday, plus, guides for summer associates on how to dress. This website requires registration, but it is free and you can subscribe to updates from the site. The website is the home of the National Law Journal, the various city-based Legal Times, and the American Lawyer.
Another good web site that I have mentioned in previous columns is the Findlaw web site, owned by Thomson, the parent company for Westlaw. Go to www.findlaw.com and try a search for dress code or business casual. Check out their new divisions in the site. They now have portions of the site devoted to Corporate Counsel and Business. In addition, they have the LawCrawler search engine that only searches legal websites and databases. If you search it, you will find some interesting articles on the change in dress codes and what constitutes “business casual.” Use other terms such as firm dress code or casual dress or casual days, in addition to your business casual search. You will find articles describing what business casual really means--no t-shirts, sundresses or shorts allowed.
An interesting website that looks at how to dress for interviews and how to buy a business suit is the MBA Style web site. While not directly addressed to attorneys, this site has a couple of good articles that include photos of proper interview suits and recommendations for suits for women. The web site is www.mbastyle.com. Be advised, though, that this site really wants to sell you their services, so just stop off for those few articles and move on quickly.
If you do a general internet search, search your local public library magazine databases, or search one of the databases such as Westlaw or Lexis, you will see many articles discussing the imminent demise of casual Fridays and business casual in general. However, from my perspective, as I watch our attorney patrons in our library, I see no evidence that casual dress is going to disappear anytime soon. The attorneys who visit us on a regular basis are usually in suits from Monday through Thursday. I sometimes look up in surprise on Fridays though to see one of my favorite attorneys walk in wearing blue jeans and a golf shirt or a Hawaiian shirt. I like that.
