May 15, 1934: Evelyn “Billie” Frechette goes on trial in room 317 of the St. Paul Federal Building for harboring a criminal—her boyfriend, John Dillinger.
July 14, 2009: Twin Cities attorneys gather in the same room—now known as the F. K. Weyerhaeuser Auditorium in St. Paul’s Landmark Center—to re-enact Frechette’s trial. Their performance didn’t have the gloss or celebrity cachet of the recently released Dillinger biopic Public Enemies (star power from Johnny Depp on the one hand, from Minnesota Supreme Court Associate Justice Paul H. Anderson on the other). But the attorneys among the 100 audience members did get two continuing-education credits apiece.
Hundreds more will watch and learn from the re-enactment. The West LegalEdcenter, a business of Eagan-based Thomson Reuters, sponsored the dramatization and now offers it on demand as one of more than 7,000 online courses.
West is “always looking for nontraditional ways to deliver programming” and suit various learning styles, says Lee Ann Enquist, West’s vice president of professional development. Earlier this year, the company hosted a session at the Guthrie Theater, where actors performed excerpts from Tony Kushner’s plays and a discussion about gender and sexual bias followed. This summer’s historical re-enactment was a first for West, but Enquist sees it as a natural fit.
“The law is precedential in nature, history is what the law is about,” she says. “So a historical perspective is important to just about every practice area.” The re-enactment of Frechette’s trial and the panel discussion afterward shed light on civil procedure, constitutional law, trial skills, witness preparation, and how jury expectations for forensic evidence have changed in the age of TV’s CSI series.
Besides, “lawyers love lawyer movies and television shows,” Enquist concludes. “They love picking them apart.”
