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Creeeeeeeeak! Welcome to Legal Ethics: The Inner Sanctum!

Legal Ethics Comes with Chills and Screams in the New ProEthics Continuing Legal Education Teleseminar

On August 10, ProEthics entertained and educated members of the Virginia Bar with an unprecedented teleseminar devised as a two-hour parody of the classic old-time radio horror show, Inner Sanctum Mysteries. Using the Ethical Arts Players' professional voice artists Mary McGowan and Richard Rowan, organ chords and sound effects, Legal Ethics: The Inner Sanctum explored challenging legal ethics issues presented in the form of four amusing horror and mystery episodes: "Lizzy Borden's Ghost," "A Heart for a Head," "The Horror of The Creeping Potato," and "The Curse of the Shrinking Star." Rowan and McGowan played over twenty characters in the seminar, which was attended, via conference call hook-up, by over 200 attorneys in two sessions.

Attendees called in and discussed ethical problems ranging from multijurisdictional practice and conflicts of interest to the confidentiality of deceased clients' files and fitness to practice law. "There is no excuse for boring legal ethics course, " says Marshall, whose previous off-beat ethics seminars include a rock-and-roll seminar with a live rocker entitled "Ethics Rock!," Broadway musical parodies, and a corporate ethics training seminar in which he plays, in full costume, a pompous alien super-hero called "Captain Compliance."

"A telephone seminar is a perfect setting for old time radio effects, and most lawyers dread mandatory ethics CLE, Marshall explains. "Creating a legal ethics teleseminar based on a horror program was an obvious step." He proposed the concept to Virginia Continuing Legal Education, for which Marshall is doing several seminars in 2006, including "Ethics Rock!" "They gave it an immediate green light," he says. "I started listening to old radio tapes and reading horror stories. The scripts were lots of fun to write."

The sound designer who created the footsteps, ax blows, blowing wind, scampering rats, and in his greatest challenge, a law office filling up with mashed potatoes, as well as the creaking door that was the trademark of "Inner Sanctum Mysteries," is professional sound designer Keith Bell. Bell has worked with Marshall (who is also a professional stage director and the artistic director of the Arlington-based professional company The American Century Theater) in theatrical productions since 1988. "Every sound designer loves the old radio shows," Bell says. "It was our Golden Age, when sound created everything: mood, set, weather, props. Doing this was a dream come true."

Any doubts about whether Virginia lawyers would accept their CLE ethics training in such an unconventional form were banished after the program received rave evaluations. Marshall was not surprised. "Lawyers generally have good senses of humor, and many of them are frustrated actors," he explains. "The more theatrical a seminar is, the better they like it, as long as the ethics issues are current ones and they learn something. Luckily, there is no lack of tough issues to cover."

"Just try resolving the S.E.C. reporting requirements of an in-house corporate lawyer faced with officer misconduct and the conflicting ethics standards in D.C., Virginia, and under the A.B.A.'s new Model Rules," Marshall says with a haunted look.

"Now that's really scary."