"Белые туфли": Престижные юридические и финансовые фирмы США

the American term
Term for prestigious law firms
In the United States, a 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 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. 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.

The phrase derives from "white bucks", laced suede or buckskin (or Nubuck) derby shoes, usually with a red sole, long popular among the student body of Ivy League colleges. A 1953 Esquire article, describing social strata at Yale University, explained that "White Shoe applies primarily to the socially ambitious and the socially smug types who affect a good deal of worldly sophistication, run, ride and drink in rather small cliques, and look in on the second halves of football games when the weather is good." The Oxford English Dictionary cites the phrase "white shoe college boys" in the J. D. Salinger novel Franny and Zooey (1957) as the first use of the term: It also appears in a 1958 Fortune article by Spencer Klaw, which describes some firms as having "a predilection for young men who are listed in the Social Register. These firms are called 'white shoe outfits', a term derived from the buckskin shoes that used to be part of the accepted uniform at certain eastern prep schools and colleges."