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When ethics specialist Jack Marshall decided to call on his background as a lyricist and stage director to create a musical legal ethics seminar for the District of Columbia Bar last March, the reactions from his colleagues ranged from horror to hilarity.

Nobody's laughing now. The program received enthusiastic praise for both its substance and its entertainment value, and Marshall is now overwhelmed with requests for ethics seminars that use humor and song to overcome the traditional drawback of ethics training: boredom.

"The bane of ethics trainings is that people are forced to attend them, either because their company's insurance insists on it, or because their professional association requires it, or because there's been a problem. They come, listen to some consultant drone on about a Code of Ethics, grit their teeth in desperate tedium, sign something that says they attended, and leave. Seldom can the program really inspire them to think about ethics, because it's dry and uninteresting. The musical seminars explore tough ethical issues, but do it with parodies of tunes that everyone knows and loves. They listen, and they learn."

Marshall's legal ethics musical seminar, The Sound of Ethics, starts a four-city tour of Virginia this week. At four hours, it is longer than its DC incarnation, and has two additional songs. One of them gives Brian Childers, one of Marshall's professional performers, the chance to reprise a role that recently won him critical praise Off-Broadway: as Danny Kaye, he sings a parody of the Kaye standard (and Cab Calloway classic) "Minnie the Moocher," complete with scat. He recently closed in a New York run of the musical Danny and Sylvia, which was also directed by Marshall.

Marshall, a lawyer whose ethics training and consulting company, ProEthics, Ltd., is marketing the musical programs to corporations, non-profits, medical research groups and government agencies as well as legal groups, admits that his longtime second career as a professional stage director has made the unique teaching approach possible. "I have access to terrific performers with impressive credits in TV, stage and film. I know what they can do, and I can write the material to highlight their talents," he says. "And the attendees are always shocked at the high caliber of the performances." ProEthics has long maintained a troupe of professional actors which it uses to illustrate ethical dilemmas and workplace issues (such as sexual harassment), but the recent demand for musical programs has caused Marshall to form a new performing group, "Ethics in Tune." "The only problem is coordinating rehearsals with the actors, who are in demand," Marshall says. "I have twelve now, and I'm recruiting more."

A highlight of The Sound of Ethics is Richard Rohan's rendition of the famous Soliloquy ("My Boy Bill") from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel. The parody, called "My Big Bill," has an unethical lawyer run off 23 different unethical ways to inflate an attorney's fee, all while singing perhaps the most difficult male solo in the Broadway canon. "I could do a whole seminar just on the issues in that song," Jack Marshall says. "Rick is amazing. He gets the laughs, he does justice to the great music, and he makes the issues clear. I can't wait to see how he handles the accounting ethics version."

"If he changes a word, I'll kill him," says Rohan, who sings the seven-minute song in his car to keep it fresh.

With the success that has come from setting his ethics seminars to music, does Marshall fear a wave of imitators? The question provokes a laugh. "Anyone is welcome to try," he says. "With all the fun, the bottom line is to actually make the attendees think about ethics. If you don't accomplish that, it's just another show."

"It's harder than it looks."

Contact Information:
Jack Marshall, Esq., President
Grace Bowen, Vice President
ProEthics, Ltd.
2707 Westminster Place
Alexandria, Virginia 22305
703-548-3754
jacko@cs.net
gbm@cs.net

For more information on this program, read this previous news release:

• The Sound of Ethics: The First Musical Legal Ethics Seminar Debuts for DC Bar