White-shoe firm

In the United States, white-shoe firm is a term used to describe prestigious professional services firms that have been traditionally associated with the upper-class elite who graduated from Ivy League colleges. (The term comes from white buckskin derby shoes (bucks), once the style among the men from the upper-class.) The term is most often used to describe leading old-line law firms and Wall Street financial institutions, as well as accounting firms that are over a century old, typically in New York City and Boston.^[1] As Ivy League elites, it implied that there was also a cultural homogeneity associated with White Anglo-Saxon Protestant men, but the term is now used more as a matter of long-established, high-end firms, especially those working in complicated business matters.

Former Wall Street attorney John Oller, author of White Shoe, credits Paul Drennan Cravath with creating the distinct model adopted by virtually all white-shoe law firms, the Cravath System, just after the turn of the 20th century, about 50 years before the phrase white-shoe firm came into use.^[2]