Jacob Stein

In a town where lawyers are pressed from cookie cutters, stuffed into gray suits and sent off to work in colorless law factories, Jacob Stein is a rarity--he's a character. He takes midday literary breaks in his antiques-strewn office to leaf through 18th-century British classics. He wears dapper chalk-striped suits and two-toned shoes to court. And he has been known to send the detachable collars and cuffs from his hand-tailored shirts to London for laundering.

But beneath Stein's quirky urban-gentleman exterior beats the heart of a Washington insider's Washington insider. A former president of the D.C. bar, Stein is the man...