Chief Loophole Officer or Chief Legal Officer: Inside Lehman Brothers—A Film Case Study About Corporate and Legal Ethics

This Article discusses the continuing legal education (CLE) visual advocacy documentary-style program, which Garrick Apollon (author of this Article) researched and developed. The case study for this CLE documentary-style program is the film Inside Lehman Brothers—a documentary film by Jennifer Deschamps which chronicles the story of the Lehman whistleblowers. The film presents Mathew Lee, former senior vice president overseeing Lehman’s global balance sheet; Oliver Budde, former in-house counsel (associate general counsel) of the Lehman Brothers; and the racialized female mid-tier manager whistleblowers, who all paid a steep price in the 2008 American subprime mortgage crisis, while many of the top-positioned white men remained unscathed. The overall aim of this course, which is pioneered on the ethical lessons we can ascertain from the Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, is to prevent corporate misconduct and fraud by promoting ethical, personal, and corporate standards of behavior for legal and business professionals.

This Article concentrates on visual legal advocacy as an instrument to encourage professional ethics to legal professionals and law students. Further, this Article argues that legal ethics can be more effectively understood through storytelling which illustrates how ethical decision-making can impact someone’s life and, as in the case of the Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy and moral failure, how it can affect the entire world, just as it did throughout the 2008 global financial crisis.