This article is provided by Stuart Teicher. Visit the link below to find their programs in CeriFiLegalEdge catalog.
I’ve spent my career doing one thing: making legal ethics education worth watching. That sounds simple, but it took me two full days of mental torture to distill it into a brand statement. I finally landed on calling myself the CLE Performer: I know we need to get substantive content, I just think it would be a nice idea for us to stay awake in the process. That combination, it turns out, is rarer than it should be.
My programs work because I treat ethics education as a performance, not a lecture. I’ve built a career connecting attorney ethics rules to pop culture, true crime, history, and storytelling, because those connections make the rules memorable in ways that a straight recitation never could. Lawyers who take my programs leave with practical knowledge they can use, and they leave having actually engaged with the material rather than endured it. I think that’s why the most common comment I get after people watch my programs is, “Wow, that was much better than I expected!”
So when I launched Good Lawyers Gone Bad, my podcast about attorney corruption, it felt like a natural next step. I’ve always been drawn to the psychology of how accomplished lawyers cross ethical lines, and the podcast lets me pursue those stories with a depth that a CLE program doesn’t always allow. In podcasting there are no credit hours to satisfy, no learning objectives to fulfill. A story gets as much room as it needs, and I’m not restricted to tying that story to ethics rules. I think that makes the story more compelling, and the result is something my CLE audience has responded to enthusiastically.
The different format requires a different creative touch. A CLE program is built to deliver takeaways; a podcast episode is built to hold attention. A CLE program imparts lessons; a podcast is about telling stories. With CLE programs lawyers need to stop and hear and digest and think. But with podcast lawyers can listen leisurely and take it easy.
But while consuming the content is less labor-intensive for the listener, it’s still pretty tough for the creator. Writing the podcast episodes takes longer than writing CLE programs because the podcast is far closer to literature. There is more art involved in the storytelling process. Interestingly, the listeners can sense that and it creates a different dynamic than you find in the CLE world. Specifically, the audience listens to the stories because they want to, not because they have to. The entire process makes me feel like an author, rather than a teacher, and that lets me scratch an artistic itch that’s been tingling my entire life.
You can find Good Lawyers Gone Bad wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want to see the CLE Performer in action, my programs are right here on CeriFi. Search for the provider “Teicher Professional Growth.”
