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"It just might be that even in continuing legal education, rock and roll is here to stay." |
Last Summer in Fairfax, Virginia, a new continuing legal education ethics seminar began by bombarding its attorney audience with an unlikely sound: the opening guitar riffs of The Who's rock opera "Tommy." It was "Ethics Rock!," the first rock and roll CLE program, and while the melodies that punctuated the four hour seminar are familiar to all, the lyrics tell of broken confidences, corporate misconduct, conflicts of interest and questionable trial tactics.
"Ethics Rock!" is the creation of attorney/ethicist Jack Marshall, president of the national ethics training and consulting firm, ProEthics, Ltd. Two years ago, his "legal ethics musical" "The Sound of Ethics," created for the District of Columbia Bar, won special recognition from the American Continuing Legal Education Association, and he followed it up with the equally successful Music Man parody, "The Ethics Man," in 2003. But Marshall began thinking about how Broadway melodies were not the songs nearest and dearest to the Baby Boomer legal set, and decided to apply his parody writing skills to the rock classics of the '60s and '70s. He recruited a friend, DC actor and classic rock singer David Jourdan, to perform the rock parodies on acoustic guitar, and "Ethics Rock!" was born.
"The challenge in legal ethics courses is to keep the participants engaged while laying out complex problems," Marshall explains. "The songs we based each parody on are so ingrained in everyone's memories that it is impossible not to listen. The trick," he says, "is to evoke the original lyrics in an amusing way while describing actual legal scenarios. Amazingly, it works."
Thus Paul Simon's "The Boxer" becomes a tragic tale about a joint representation gone wrong; the Beatle's "A Day in the Life" morphs into a diary of a slippery litigator's courtroom antics, and "American Pie" becomes "The Day My Ethics Died," a lament about the dilemmas posed by Sarbanes-Oxley. There are eleven songs in all (seven in the three hour version) covering more than forty legal ethics issues. Marshall acknowledges that the unusual seminar was the inevitable result of his own diverse background: before turning to ethics as his full-time profession, he created popular musical legal parodies for The Music Lobby (a predecessor of The Capitol Steps that performed for law firms, government agencies, and even the US Supreme Court). "I may be the only professional musical parody writing legal ethicist around," he says. "It's a pretty specialized niche." Marshall's firm, ProEthics, creates and facilitates innovative ethics training seminars for bar associations, Fortune 500 companies, associations, non-profits, and governments, as well as non-legal professions such as accounting, medical and scientific research, manufacturing and communications. The company frequently uses professional actors, and maintains its own performing company, The Ethical Arts Players.
In seminars outside the Washington D.C, area, New York singer-guitarist Mike Messer takes over for Jourdan. He is a rising star of kid's rock, with pop star good looks and spectacular guitar technique. Messers version of "Ethics Rock" has been presented to New York law firms, and bar groups in Rhode Island, Alabama and Missouri. Jourdan, whose specialty is dead-on impressions of the original artists like Jim Croce and Cat Stevens, has performed for DC based law firms, and will be handling the D.C. Bar's presentation of "Ethics Rock" in March.
"Legal ethics is a fascinating topic, and yet it has a terrible reputation for making boring seminars," Marshall says. "These great songs not only raise the energy level of the session; they also make it fun to get the facts underlying the problems we analyze. How can you be bored when there's a smile on your face, you're tapping your foot, and maybe even singing along?"
"It just might be that even in continuing legal education, rock and roll is here to stay."