Can Lawyers Wear T-Shirts On Video Client Calls?

The pandemic-prompted proliferation of video conferencing began innocently enough, with lawyers porting their normal, in-office behavior to the online world. This lasted roughly 5 minutes before we started seeing folks naked at criminal hearings, naked at law school lectures, client meeting oral sex, and at least one famous legal analyst, um, brandishing his gavel?

While most lawyers didn’t opt to transform their Teams meetings to OnlyClients (it’s like OnlyFans except the subscription price is way, way higher), the move to video has brought a general drift toward the casual. Drew Morris, the managing partner of First Circle GC an outside general counsel outfit for up-and-coming companies, raised this in a post that kicked up quite the lawyerly hornet’s nest:

As the post sparked a deluge of responses, Morris made clear that he wasn’t entirely dogmatic about the stance. For instance in this exchange with occasional Above the Law columnist Darren Heitner:

That said, as a sports lawyer, Heitner’s clients aren’t necessarily the stuffy boardroom types that Morris probably had in mind. This also might be the only Venn overlap where elite athletes and legal technologists meet:

Personally, I’ve taken the stance that lawyers should sartorially meet their clients where they are. Business psychology studies suggest that people trust other people who dress like they do. So wear a three piece suit to talk to the investment banker and a hoodie to talk to the tech startup. Insert some caveats about clients who crave an asymmetric professionalism relationship and seek out a lawyer for the purpose of being their stereotypical “adult,” but, generally, I think lawyers should leave their options open to match their clients.

Still, Morris tilts toward formality:

In this economy? Hasn’t inflation placed collared shirts outside the budget of anyone billing less than $2k/hour?

The answer is no, by the way, despite the protests of the WSJ’s opinion page.

A lot of the conversation — especially as to ties and jackets — is very male-coded, but the t-shirt question matters for women too. While women’s business attire offers a few more options for formal looking tops, attorneys still don’t necessarily need to pull the dress shirt out of the closet for meetings.

The Virginia Bar Exam notoriously makes its bar applicants play douchebag dress-up just to sit in a room and fill out a Scantron. Its archaic approach to testing refused access to women wearing pants until much more recently than you’d like to think. Examiners justify the move as requiring “court appropriate attire” despite knowing full well that many, if not most, attorneys don’t go to court, but they make the aspiring tax lawyers dress like Atticus Finch anyway.

But where is the line when it comes to a client meeting?

At least it’s not a dark worsted suit with no tie… we don’t want to evoke the wrath of Derek Guy. It’s not clear if this dress shirt only rule is generally applicable to client meetings or if it’s a special carve out for video calls, with in-person meetings still call for a more formal look.

But in any event, this concession raises the prospect that Morris is just a lagging indicator in the move toward casual dress. Just a button down shirt (which is technically a shirt with buttons for the collar tips as opposed to a “button up shirt” which employs collar stays… but we assume they’re talking about any kind of collared dress shirt) is a level of business casual that drew gasps several years ago. I was once disinvited from an impromptu client meeting in the conference room because I didn’t have a jacket to go with my dress shirt and slacks combo, with the partner declaring the lack of a jacket “kind of jerky.”

So if the more formal side of the debate is already all the way down to just wearing a dress shirt then the Overton Window has shifted dramatically over the last decade.

Or has it? Let’s find out!

But maybe there’s a compromise answer that’s been staring us in the face all along?

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.