BusinessReport.com

You wouldn’t think a lecture on legal ethics would bring an audience to its feet, but throw in a song or two and they’re eating out of your hand.

Mike Rubin, an attorney and jazz pianist, discovered this in the early 1980s, when he first incorporated music into a speech he gave for a group of real estate lawyers in Atlanta.

“I figured if I was going to bomb, I may as well bomb big,” he says. “They loved it.”

Rubin’s firm is McGlinchey Stafford, where he heads the appellate section and runs an active commercial litigation, appellate and finance practice. He’s also been an adjunct law professor at LSU, Southern and Tulane for more than 30 years.

But since the Atlanta gig, Rubin also has earned a nationwide reputation for wowing seminar audiences with learned discourses on ethics, real estate, finance and other topics capped with funny yet germane songs he’s written—sung to chestnuts like “Ain’t Misbehavin’ “ or “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

Rubin has given more than 200 major speeches and includes music in most of them. It’s not light stuff. Before he entertains, he educates. Rubin recently returned from London, for instance, where he spoke to a group of solicitors, barristers and clients.

The topic was “The Ethics of Negotiation: Are There Any? A Look From Both Sides of the Pond,” involving a PowerPoint presentation with more than 200 slides, each containing five to seven animations. Running time: 55 minutes.

“I give a serious talk,” Rubin says. “I prepared a 58-page paper with 175 footnotes. And then I gave a presentation that hopefully they will find both informative and amusing. And then I end it, quite unexpectedly. I tell [the organizers] don’t tell people in advance what I’m going to do because it kind of shocks them.”

And who wants to follow that? Mercifully, Rubin’s presentations are usually scheduled before a break, in consideration of the next speaker. He gives 20 or 30 speeches a year to private trade groups, bar associations, sales groups and college audiences. He also makes presentations—including song—for general audiences on Louisiana’s peculiar legal system, “That Strange Civil Code: What the Heck is it and How Did Louisiana Get It?”

Among Rubin’s other greatest hits: “The Patriot Act—Salute it or Shoot It?” and “Belly Up to the Bar: A Lighthearted Look at Lawyers and Judges.”

Audience participation is not unheard of, including Rubin’s presentation to the Louisiana Bar Association and the Louisiana Judicial College, the arm of the state judiciary that conducts continuing legal education.

“I ran that meeting, and I had three judges actually singing songs that I wrote as part of that presentation,” he says.

Rubin says he doesn’t want to toot his own horn too loudly, but concedes his presentations bring standing ovations more than half the time and—at the very least—rousing applause. He owes a debt to his father, the former federal Judge Alvin Rubin, who once did similar shtick [with a young Mike Rubin accompanying on piano].

He also credits Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-educated mathematician and MIT professor who in the 1950s and 1960s gained fame as a pianist/satirist with songs like “The Elements,” a list of the chemical elements sung to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Major General’s Song.” Lehrer’s musical parody career was brief, though he’s still considered a giant of the genre.

“He’s an absolute hero,” Rubin says. “I still have the original 78.”

Rubin’s other influences include jazz piano legends Dave Brubeck, Herbie Hancock, Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans. As a child, Rubin took lessons from Evans’ older brother, Harry, in Baton Rouge. At the University of Massachusetts, Rubin played jazz professionally.

Marilyn Maloney, an attorney with Liskow & Lewis in Houston, got Rubin to speak for the Texas state bar’s advanced real estate seminar this summer in San Antonio. The 600-plus lawyers in the room didn’t make a sound, Maloney says. They were captivated. She says Rubin is able to present topics that are vitally important but “dry as a bone” in an engaging and thought-provoking manner.

Nothing grips an audience like a lecturer who underscores his points with a grand piano and alternative lyrics to Broadway show tunes.

“Ogden Nash would be proud,” Maloney says. “He’s forcing rhymes where rhymes don’t exist.”

But it serves a serious purpose: helping lawyers get a handle on ethics and other issues of paramount importance to the profession.

“It’s really the most important thing there is for a lawyer to understand and really internalize,” she says.

Jack Weiss, chancellor of LSU’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center, calls Rubin’s performances “an amazing combination of musical talent and a really creative sense of humor and technological skill.” Rubin is the star, with the piano and computer projectors co-starring, he says.

“To make this work, he has to have a very sharp and sensitive understanding of his audience and of the people who he pulls into his presentations,” Weiss says. “It really is a talent unlike any I’ve seen before, and I can understand why he’s in demand all over the country.”