The Economist described the term as synonymous with "big, old, east-coast and fairly traditional." In the 21st century, the term is sometimes used in a general sense to refer to firms that are perceived as prestigious or high-quality; it is also sometimes used in a derogatory manner to denote stodginess, elitism, or a lack of diversity. Examples The following U.S. firms are often referred to as being white-shoe firms: Accountancy The current Big Four accounting firms and the former Big Eight auditors from which they merged: Deloitte (merged from Deloitte Haskins & Sells and Touche Ross) Ernst & Young (merged from Ernst & Whinney and Arthur Young) KPMG (formerly Peat Marwick Mitchell) PricewaterhouseCoopers (merged from Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand) The only former Big Eight firm not merged into one of the Big Four was Arthur Andersen, which went out of business in 2002 after the Enron scandal. Banking Traditional Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. Dillon, Read & Co. (acquired by UBS in 1998) First Boston (acquired by Credit Suisse in 1990) Kuhn, Loeb & Co. (merged with Lehman Brothers in 1977) J.P. Morgan & Co. (merged with Chase Manhattan in 1996, and became JPMorgan Chase in 2000) Morgan Stanley White Weld & Co. (acquired by Merrill Lynch in 1978) Modern Barclays Goldman Sachs Morgan Stanley JPMorgan Chase Lazard Frères & Co. UBS Management Consultancies The Big Three (management consultancies), colloquially known as ‘’‘MBB’’’, consisting of the largest management consulting firms by revenue: McKinsey & Company Bain & Company Boston Consulting Group Law Traditional Arnold & Porter Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft Covington & Burling Cravath, Swaine & Moore Davis Polk & Wardwell Debevoise & Plimpton Goodwin Procter Hogan & Hartson merged with Lovells LLP into Hogan Lovells Mayer Brown Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy Ropes & Gray Shearman & Sterling Sidley Austin Simpson Thacher & Bartlett Sullivan & Cromwell White & Case Willkie Farr & Gallagher WilmerHale Modern While the term "white-shoe" historically applied only to those law firms populated by WASPs, usage of the term has since been expanded to other top-rated prestigious firms. Many of these firms were founded as a direct result of the exclusionary tendencies of the original white-shoe firms, which provided limited opportunities for Jewish and Catholic lawyers, as well as other non-WASPs, and include: Cahill Gordon & Reindel Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson Greenberg Traurig Jones Day