Lawyer Story: Dressing for Court

 


     When I started practicing law in 1974, I had to learn how to dress appropriately for the formalities of court. We were in the midst of the hippy era, but dashikis for men and ankle-length tie-dyed skirts paired with waffle stompers for women wouldn’t do. It took me a while to find the right costumes, but there were people whose naiveté, or whose attitude toward formality, was even more pronounced than mine. And time has not diminished the requirements.

     I started out with one pink shirt-dress for job interviews. When I put on a little black dress with ruffles to wear to the grand courtroom where all the lawyers stood around waiting for their cases to be called, somebody told me that I looked like I was going to a cocktail party. Feminism hadn’t affected the market yet, and “Dress for Success” hadn’t been published yet, so I had few options.  I had to wait, literally for years, before the stores started carrying business suits for women.

     Men’s costumes were standard business suits, ties, and shined shoes. Only three lawyers in all of Seattle varied the costume: Irving Paul, Public Defender, wore a short ski jacket over his long suit jacket, and didn’t always remove the ski coast while he handled quick matters. Another defender, an immigrant from Columbia, South America, wore his conservative suit with sky blue shoes. And inconoclastic lawyer Alva Long wore pastel leisure suits with a tie lapped over, but not tied at his neck. When he fiddled with the tie once, Judge Eberharter told him “Forget about it, Mr. Long. You won’t get it right anyway.”

     It was a big help to me when Loehmann’s off-discount clothing store opened at Factoria, just across Lake Washington from Seattle. They tended to have fresh styles and more sizes for shorties than did the conventional department stores. But they had just one general dressing room, no private booths, so everybody eyed everybody else’s try-ons, and sometimes offered gratuitous comments. Once when I put on a red rayon sheath with big padded shoulders, two older Jewish women dashed across the room to touch the fabric, and cried out “Joan Crawford!”

     When nice women’s suits in petite sizes finally landed on the racks, I chose one that was dark raspberry pink. An insurance defense attorney looked at me wistfully, and said, “I wish I could wear colors like a plaintiff’s lawyer.” Her concession to style was one long, skinny braid in her proper collar-length haircut, and she pinned it out of sight during working hours.

     But it isn't just lawyers who need to dress up. Dressing up shows respect for the court, and if the court doesn’t command respect, the judicial system does not work, so jurors and witnesses need to look right, too.  When I prepared to voir dire a jury panel (examine them before trial for possible bias), my clients referred to one potential juror as “Muscle boy.” He was wearing shorts and a muscle shirt that made him look like a total scoff-law, and my clients were police officers. However, others on the panel (suburban housewives) expressed such overt hostility to cops that we kept muscle boy on our jury. The next day,when the presentation of evidence started, he showed up in a lavender three-piece suit, dress shirt, necktie with a gold tie bar, and shined shoes. We were astonished, until the judge’s bailiff explained that she had told him to dress up, and he had done his very best.

     The firm I was with needed to call a central Washington cowboy, a literal cowboy, to the witness stand for a major prairie fire case. When they told him to dress up, he came to court in his best, crisp, new blue jeans. It looked so simple and honest that the lawyers were thrilled.

     But then there was the expert witness with an attitude. He was working on a construction case in Alaska, and he looked like a sourdough. When attorney Bruce Rinker told him that he needed to shave for court, he shaved, all right. He showed up with his beard as long and scraggly as ever, but he had shaved his head.

     Judge Janette Burridge tried too hard to enforce a dress code in her courtroom. By the 1990s, women’s suits included good pant suits. When she tried to require the women in her courtroom to wear skirts and dresses, the media leaped on her order as being scandalous, and she was voted out of office at the next elections.

     The rules persist. When Eric appeared before Judge LeRoy McCullough, the judge asked him to step forward after their proceeding had ended. Eric knew that the judge was a classmate of mine,  and a personal friend, and they had been introduced. Eric thought there might be a personal message, but no. Judge McCullough said, “Mr. Martin, where is your tie?”