Monday, October 6, 2014

Please Don’t Pick Your Teeth at Meetings

You might think that you’re invisible because you’re looking down at your paperwork, but we, the other meeting attendees, the people sitting next to you and across from you, can see you. What are you doing with that now unstuck food particle? Eating it? Wiping it on your pants? Planning to shake our hand with that mouth-swiping finger?

Also, don’t comb your hair at meetings. Even though you’ve reached into your bag to fetch your comb and think that by dipping your head close to the table top that you’re now unseen just because you are not looking at us, we, the people sitting next to you and across from you, can see you. We can also see the lint and the extraneous hairs that are now landing on our notepads, our computers, our clothing.

One would think that, as a society, we’d have advanced beyond the point where reproach is necessary.  We haven’t. Check out any meeting and watch at least one attendee engage in questionable behavior. Grooming is an activity to be done in private, or at least in a restroom, not at a conference table or a dining table or in the middle of a cocktail party. You want to be known as the lawyer who toured clean-tech companies in Switzerland, not as the one with the disgusting table manners.

People get selected, or hired, for all sorts of reasons having nothing to do with their core qualifications or their pedigree. Often the one who makes it off the short list is the one the decider likes more.  Be likable, not repulsive.

—Lori Tripoli

Interested in appropriate behavior within your law office? Consider these posts:

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