Careers
Ex BigLaw Associate: I Was Arrested By Law Firm Fashion Police
Posted Jan 27, 2009, 02:18 pm CST
By Martha Neil
While working as a fifth-year associate at a BigLaw firm in New York, Tracey Batt thought her black leather ankle boots, black leather trench coat and dark-colored "mannish" pantsuits with long jackets looked just fine as business-casual attire.
But her law firm thought otherwise. An office encounter with several superiors one day was her first warning that she not only was being arrested by the fashion police but was being sent to a full-scale rehabilitation program, Batt recounts in a National Law Journal article reprinted by New York Lawyer (reg. req.).
"The firm had hired someone to take me shopping and to a high-end salon for a full makeover," she writes. "It was positively mortifying."
Her fashion issue is now largely resolved, because Batts no longer works at BigLaw. As the person in charge of a small nonprofit legal services organization in New Jersey she wears whatever she wants as she works at her home, and only has to dress for success when attending meetings, giving speeches and teaching a class at a local law school.
According to the biographical information for her NLJ column, she was formerly an associate at Weil Gotshal & Manges in New York.
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