How To Dress For A Law Firm Interview

The invaluable and charming A²Z blog of University of Michigan Law School Director of Admissions and Assistant Dean Sarah Zearfoss scores again. If you need to know how to dress for that important interview and also want to maintain a light-hearted attitude about it, this piece is your ticket. Read the whole thing to be prepared head-to-toe, but here are some key points:

• For women’s suits, everyone who opined said that either pants or a skirt is fine. (Never both at the same time.) But in the interest of full disclosure, they then also universally went on to repeat some horror story they’d heard about a conservative elderly judge yelling at a women in pants—so clearly, there is some lingering concern. If you’re wearing a skirt, length should be around the knee; remember that it will rise up an inch or two when you sit down. (The judge I clerked for had an awesome story from when he was a trial judge about 110,000 years ago. A female litigant came into court in a pantsuit, which at the time just blew his mind; he told her lawyer that she could not wear pants in court, and granted a recess to remedy the wardrobe malfunction. When she came back, she was wearing what he took to be a shockingly short dress—until he realized it was simply the suit jacket, and she had just eschewed the pants. He learned a vivid, never-forgotten lesson about bossing around women in matters of dress.)

• Men must match socks to the color of the suit. This is not the time for your festive argyles. Women must do the same for a pantsuit, or, if they’re wearing a skirt, don skin-colored sheer pantyhose—not actual bare skin, mind you, consistent with the counsel of Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy’s mother. This is not the time for the fishnet or the opaque colors.

• This could be the most important piece of advice: Take your suit to the tailor (preferably not a dry cleaner who happens to do alterations, but an actual tailor). This may add to the cost, but it makes all the difference in whether you look like a million bucks or like a kid playing dress up in the parent’s clothes. Getting a tailor to fix you up also helps to ensure that you’ll feel confident and comfortable in the suit, and that is absolutely key to how you present on the non-superficial level.