1. What type of companies? (pun intended).
2. Is this part of an overall identity system?
3. Are they willing to pay for it?

Not an extremely inspired list, no?
Do you want the typeface for text or letterhead?

@Christopher - *GAKK!* This is my misunderstanding you've got there!

The "typography for lawyers" blogger and author expresses his preference for Lyon.
I find Rawlinson 2.0 from Terminaldesign has similar qualities.

I viewed Rawlinson and it looks great. Very readable. I also checked out Lyon Text which is another terrific font.

Thanks!

@kupfers - This is mostly my own personal correspondence. I was writing some legal letters a year ago and became very interested in type face during that time frame. It's really amazing how typeface can even alter the way a letters comes across.

At the moment, I'm leaning towards Stempel Garamond for the body. I think Lyon looks great, however it's too pricey. Do you have any other recommendations for letterhead and/or body?

Thanks

My advise for affordable typefaces would be the following:

Epic seems to be interesting:
http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/positype/epic/

In a summery about classical text fonts of the pre-digital age, found here: http://www.textism.com/textfaces/index.html?id=19
there are some fonts highlighted as "having survived the transition to digital well". I personally like Sabon, Dante und Janson, which are available for 29USD a weight. Albertina is a fine piece of work, but the Dutch Type Library is not a cheap foundry.

DSType has a couple of nice serifs: Glosa, Leitura, Musee, Capsa
http://www.dstype.com/

One font I have never heard being mentioned by anybody – nor can I find any information about the foundry – is Pevensey. It is very affordable, and is very similar to Times, but does not have the condensed proportions. http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/aah-yes/pevensey/

Interesting as well is SFPL from Stone Type foundry, a classical looking serif font for only 39USD for the whole family. There is no bold italic and the character range is rather small though. http://www.stonetypefoundry.com/sfploverview.html

All of the above mentioned come with the advantage, that they are not any of the usual suspects.

There are even some interesting typefaces for free available:

A common newspaper font is Utopia, available for LaTeX uses for free here: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/utopia/
Did not read up on the licence situation here.

PTSerif was just released: http://www.paratype.com/public/

Junicode follows the classic English old-style typefaces:
http://junicode.sourceforge.net/
but personally I would recommend to expand it by 3 or 4 per cent.

With all the advise keep in mind please that I am not an expert. Let your eyes be the judges and please check if the character range suits your demands.

Thanks for all the recommendations!

The "typography for lawyers" blogger and author expresses his preference for Lyon.

I used Lyon for my book. Commercial Type has just come out with an "office" version of it (for use in apps without OT support)

For letters, I use Stempel Garamond.

For court filings and other legal documents, I often use Sabon.

How about your/Matthew Butterick’s new typeface Alix, this month’s featured face for the typophile headers.

As Trevor Baum pointed out in a thread linking here some of the DS-Type fonts are to quirky to be real workhorses.
For business correspondence the same would probably be true for the free PT-Serif or Junicode.

As Trevor Baum pointed in a thread linking here some of the DS-Type fonts are to quirky to be real workhorses, namely Leiture. In my opinion that would be true for Capsa too, as it is quite warm and very dark on the page.
For business correspondence the same would probably be true for the free PT-Serif or Junicode.