The summer legal conference circuit runs June through August. Tax Section, Family Law, Real Property — rooms full of lawyers reading each other at professional speed. What you carry matters more than most people admit.
The people who didn’t want a 911 turned out to be a large, loyal, and surprisingly discerning group. The 944’s dismissal was reputational — imposed by people who had decided what the car meant before they sat in it.
The dress shirt with French cuffs and no jacket is one of those combinations that works in theory, falls apart in practice, and yet keeps reappearing in the wardrobes of men who should know better.
Legal training is almost entirely content-focused. Almost nothing in formal education addresses composure as a professional discipline — how a lawyer stands when a ruling goes against them, what their face does when opposing counsel scores a point.
Partners stopped carrying them. Young associates never started. But the briefcase didn’t disappear — it migrated to a specific kind of lawyer, in a specific kind of courtroom, doing a specific kind of work.
The unwritten rule experienced litigators know and rarely teach: silence functions as legal pressure. In depositions, settlement conferences, and partner meetings, the lawyer who speaks first after an uncomfortable pause usually loses something.