LegalEagle, the Internet’s Favorite Lawyer, Makes Sense of ‘Multiple Watergates per Week’ (Re-air)

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1:16From Wired, this is The Big Interview, where we'll get to know the people behind the headlines in conversations that explore the intersection of technology, power, and culture. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director, and my guest today is Devin Stone. Or on YouTube, you may know him as Legal Eagle. This channel is about breaking down the American legal system, from deconstructing your favorite courtroom dramas to explaining what's going on in the news. My mission is to give you an insider's view into our courtrooms and our legal process. And with 3.9 million subscribers, they seem to be onto something.

1:53Here with me now is the Legal Eagle himself, Devin Stone. Devin, welcome. Thanks for having me. It's a really interesting time to be a content creator, a really interesting time to be a lawyer, and a really interesting time to be both a content creator and a lawyer. I have no doubt. I can't wait to ask you all about it. And I wanted to start by saying and letting our audience know, if you have not checked out Legal Eagle on YouTube, you are a real practicing lawyer. You're also a law professor at Georgetown. you also have this enormously popular YouTube channel. So I am trying to triangulate a little bit how you get all of this done.

2:27But I'm curious to sort of back up what made you go from, OK, I'm going to get my law degree. I'm going to go down a conventional path to YouTube. How do you end up there? You spend a lot of years grinding away at a very large national law firm where you get the best training in the world. and then when it comes to the time when you would be elevated to partner, realize that you are completely burned out and that it would be more fun to just make videos and post them to the internet. Now, you do a lot of very serious legal breakdowns on your channel. I want to spend time talking about those, but first I want to talk about the fun stuff, like breaking down legal representations as they appear in film or in TV, how accurate the series suits, starring, of course, Meghan Markle, really are.

3:17The episodes are a lot of fun. I'm curious, who's getting it right? Like, have you seen some really high integrity examples of how the law profession and the law are portrayed in TV and film? Oh, yeah, for sure. And I don't want to give the impression that I don't enjoy a ridiculous portrayal of lawyers and trials. For the record, I think Suits is probably one of my favorite TV shows. I think it's incredibly good. Okay. All right. I'll I'll tread lightly. Soos is not going to make it into my list of most accurate portrayals. I would say that the TV show that stands out the most is Better Call Saul.

3:55They really did their homework in terms of making sure that what they were doing was very legally accurate. And honestly, I don't think the show needed that. They could have taken a lot more liberties than they actually did. but honestly as a lawyer watching breaking bad and watching the adventures of sol goodman i had another layer of enjoyment that so much of uh you know the drudgery of litigation where it's you know pushing papers all day long and doing a lot of legal research they actually did a lot of that stuff and and they might have sped up the timetable a bit but the issues that they were dealing with really rang true as someone who you know has spent 12 and 13 hour days in front of a computer looking up code.

4:38And then I would say the movie that almost every lawyer, myself included, would say really gets it right is My Cousin Vinny. Oh, wow. That is a throwback. Yeah. I mean, it obviously features a hapless show Pesci getting his way through the legal system and sort of learning in real time as the audience does. But the things that they do in that show are, again, not only incredibly accurate, but unbelievably entertaining as well. And, And, you know, people in trial advocacy classes will look to the many cross-examinations that Joe Pesci does in that show and point to it as a good example of something that you can and should do as a trial lawyer.

5:13And now I have to ask, I mean, obviously, I'm disappointed to hear that the profession of law is not just sexy people flirting and looking incredible. That's that's too bad. But in the spirit of fun, I mean, look, it's not that you can you can be sexy and flirting and winning cases. but who are the egregious offenders out there? Like, are there shows just putting out kind of nonsense legalese into the universe? Oh, yeah. More often than not, that's the case. Kim Kardashian's new show. Oh, yeah. Have not seen that one, unfortunately. I mean, it is entertaining. I will give it that. For the costumes alone and the ridiculous dramas that they find themselves in, it's a very entertaining show, but it is not legally accurate.

5:58And it's funny because that show purports to take place in my old office in Century City in Los Angeles. And the sets are physically impossible to exist in the buildings that they claim they are in, which is just a weird coincidence that I happen to know that building really well. But apart from that, the legal stuff that they talk about in that show is pretty riceable. And I actually, a lot of it deals with divorce law. And I reached out to some divorce law lawyer friends and I mean, they were just falling out of their chair. The things were so ridiculous. It's too bad because isn't she a lawyer?

6:29No, not yet. Oh, still not a lawyer. Okay. Still not a lawyer. And that's a great way to kind of look back and take stock of the Legal Eagle channel is that one of the first videos that I did in talking about the legal news was talking about how Kim Kardashian was taking the time and going through this really unusual route of becoming a lawyer. Yeah, which is very admirable, just to be clear. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, she comes from a family of lawyers. She's very passionate about, you know, criminal justice reform, and I laud her for that. Yeah. But, you know, as long as she's been trying to be a lawyer is about the same amount of time that Legal Eagle has been trying to explain the law as well.

7:12She'll get there eventually. Oh, Kim. Kim, it's time to focus. You've got to pass that bar. So I know that there is a lot of fun on the channel, right? But you are also operating in a really unprecedented context right now when we talk about the United States of America, the political environment. And there's a lot of that that shows up on the channel. And I think that that's fascinating. So a lot of coverage, you know, has used the word unprecedented to describe the times that we are living through. And we have some really sophisticated, you know, complex legal cases and legal situations coming up with the Trump administration.

7:44How has all of that changed your channel? What has Trump 2.0 meant for you at LegalEagle? Yeah. Or as our president has said, unprecedented times that we live in. Among the many things that he said, he has said that, yeah. The channel started as commentary on pop culture and explaining legal issues and sort of dipping our toe into legal news. I don't know if you remember, but it was sort of inane things like people were going to invade Area 51 and Naruto run through the gates because they wanted to find the aliens inside. And whether someone had committed crime on the International Space Station and whether Kim Kardashian could eventually pass the bar.

8:29Eventually, that morphed into wanting to really capture the interest that I had in law school, where, you know, every day we would learn something new and it would be like, wow, that's a really fascinating piece of legal trivia or a really interesting legal rule. And, you know, I really was fascinated in everything that I learned in law school. And so we slowly started to expand our coverage of legal issues. And eventually the lodestar of the channel was, OK, we'll release maybe one news piece a week. And what we'll do is we'll just find the single most important legal issue of that week and we will deconstruct it and explain it to people.

9:15And that has largely continued. But over the course of the first and now second Trump administration, the number of legal issues that sort of reached that threshold of this is so unbelievably important that we have to break it down and we have to explain it has exploded. We are now putting out three to five videos per week, which we have never done before. And, you know, I am incredibly grateful for everyone that's part of Legal Eagle. There are a lot of lawyers behind the scenes who are researching and writing and now hosting videos alongside me. So it's absolutely a team effort. And of course, the video editors who put all the stuff together and make us look good.

9:57But yeah, I mean, that general idea of we have to explain this stuff because with few exceptions, no one else is doing it. So, you know, we live in a world where I'm not exaggerating when I say we have probably had in the in the second Trump administration 20 to 30 scandals and legal issues slash problems that rise to the level of the severity of Watergate. Wow. And so there are now essentially multiple Watergates per week. And so we feel that it's our responsibility to cover those things. And we don't want to sugarcoat things and say, oh, you know, there is a legal solution to some of these things when there isn't.

10:43And we're pretty upfront when we say that, you know, here is what the law covers and, you know, here's what the law does not cover. And some of these things are sort of moral issues or norms that are being broken as opposed to a legal rule. We're upfront about that. But at the same time, it's just been an absolute deluge. And I feel like the lawyers are sort of the Cassandras here, where because we know what the law is, and if you have any knowledge of presidential administrations going back several decades, you understand how unprecedented this stuff truly is. My main worry is that there has been such a deluge and there is this thought that, oh, if you're criticizing the president, then it must be partisan politics.

11:31And it's devolved into ideological differences where it's my team versus yours, that week in and week out, if we are, let's say, critical of the unprecedented and often highly legal or often highly norm breaking things that the Trump administration is doing, people will assume that you are a partisan hack and that maybe worst of all, there are a lot of people who just turned 18 and are turning 18, and they will just assume that whatever this president is doing is just politics as normal. Right. It's a good point. One of my main concerns is that, and this is a quasi-legal, quasi-political standpoint, but one of my main concerns is that when this is all over, if there is not truth and reconciliation and a whole bunch of people in this administration don't go to jail for the illegal conduct that they have committed, then we're going to really backslide.

12:26And because, you know, once you lose it, you really don't get it back. There's been so much flooding of the zone that it's I don't blame people for tuning out or assuming that this is just the way politics always is. But you're right. I mean, we're talking in April. So Trump's been in office for a second time for less than a year and a half, which is a shocking thing to say out loud. And, you know, I am in news. I cover news. I read the news many, many times a day. And I cannot keep up. When you said 20 to 30 Watergate level scandals, I believe you. I believe that that is correct. I could not list those.

13:05You know what I mean? Because it is coming so fast and so furious, let alone list them, let alone actually be able to break down what happened, how it happened, and why it's significant. I mean, is there one that stands out to you when you think about all the explainers that you've had to do or that you felt the need to do in the last year and a half that has been particularly complicated, particularly profound to you? I don't think any of these are particularly complicated. You know, if we use Watergate as an exemplar and just think about one of the big turning points of Watergate was the Saturday Night Massacre where many people in the DOJ left or were fired because they refused to engage in political actions at President Nixon's behest.

13:51There have been at least five of those that I can think of off the top of my head. Emile Bove trying to prosecute or explicitly refusing to prosecute Eric Adams. You have several different tranches of DOJ attorneys resigning, whether it was because of political prosecutions of the president's enemies like James Comey or Letitia James or Lisa Cook. You have massive corruption from the president and his family when it comes to individual holdings or donations of, you know, a 747 from Qatar, making billions of dollars from crypto assets while in office. I mean, I'm missing. That was hard to listen to, but I asked the question.

14:37It's my fault. But yeah, I mean, and, you know, we'll remember that one week and we'll forget it the next because. Absolutely. You know, there's just another thing. And now a lot of that's been pushed aside because of the current war in Iran. But the big story before that was essentially militarizing ICE and CBP against Americans in Minneapolis. Before that, it was deploying the National Guard to other largely democratic cities and states like Washington, D.C., where I live, where we still see uniformed National Guards people roaming the streets. One that is, I think, lost on people are just the sheer number of what I would call economic crimes that are being perpetrated.

15:22And what I mean by that is this administration has been singularly sort of focused on either refusing to pay funds that have been appropriated by Congress to largely blue states or to programs and agencies that are required by law by Congress refusing to pay those funds. That sounds very sort of administrative. It sounds sort of ticky tacky. Oh, you know, OK, so he's paying out people and agencies that, you know, shouldn't be paid. But that really strikes at the heart of our democracy, that it's Congress's job to pass laws related to funding. That is their primary job, in fact. And, you know, already we live in a world where presidential power has been, you know, agglomerating for so many years that we're at the zenith of presidential power.

16:13And I would say most people think that that's probably a bad thing. But this president has taken so much more power from Congress and the judiciary himself. And, you know, when you do things like, you know, refuse to pay funds that have been appropriated by Congress, especially I'm using air quotes, you may not be able to see it, but refusing to pay funds to your political enemies, like, you know, quote unquote, blue states, and then just refusing to follow the law when it comes to, you know, not paying out funds that haven't been appropriated. And that's that's real authoritarian stuff. That's real bad stuff, because we've seen that the judiciary is just not up to dealing with someone who just says, screw it, we'll we'll do it and they can stop me later.

16:58As many narcissists and presidents that we've had who really wanted to grab power, this one is a difference of kind rather than degree. And we're all dealing with the fallout from that. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

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18:21That's nordlayer.com slash browser slash uncanny valley and enter coupon code uncanny valley 10 at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18+. I'm curious for you.

19:04I mean, you have a significant audience on YouTube. You are very much of the internet. There are people, I mean, I looked you up, I saw what people say about you on Reddit, you know, all that stuff. In doing the job that you feel like you need to be doing right now for good reason, you are often criticized as taking a political point of view, right? You alluded to it earlier, being liberal, being a leftist, all of these things for trying to cover this uniquely frightening and I think uniquely damaging political situation that we have found ourselves in in this country. How do you think about that?

19:43And how do you try to maybe reach some of those people who might otherwise be unreachable, if that makes sense? I think so much of the internet now and so many conversations online are happening in these little bubbles, right? Everyone stays in their bubble. If you're in the Fox News bubble, it might really behoove you to watch some Legal Eagle videos on YouTube. You know what I mean? Do you worry about not being able to reach those people? Well, that's kind of you to say. I do worry about that. You know, you can only do so much. And I guess we all put our faith in the YouTube algorithm that it will show the videos to the people that need or want to see them.

20:22A lot of faith in that algorithm. Yeah, I for one welcome our artificial intelligence overlords. But yeah, I mean, you know, I see those comments on occasion as well. And, you know, the way I think about it, And I felt compelled to do a video on this very topic. Largely, we'll do what we call entertainment videos or news-related videos. And then occasionally, we'll do a full-on op-ed. And you can usually tell— Oh, and this was about—this was that you were biased. It was that video? Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yes. And you know stuff's about to get real when you see my face on a black background in the thumbnail.

20:59Oh, no. That's when you know things are serious and I'm going to give you my unfarnished opinion. And yeah, the way that I think about it is we believe in the rule of law. We believe strongly that politicians of every stripe should support the rule of law such that the law is applied equally and fairly, regardless of who you are, that politicians and administrations should follow the law. And if they have a problem with that, they can change the law or specifically they can ask Congress to change the law. And that if a president of any administration is not going to do that, then we are going to take a stand and criticize that person.

21:39And I would agree that that is a somewhat political stance. Law is the end result of politics after all. So, you know, I think that that is a nonpartisan position or, you know, maybe not recently, but it used to be a nonpartisan position. The fact that it is perhaps a partisan position says more about the political parties than it does, I think, about that position itself. We never take a partisan position. You know, we are not like the pod save boys who will opine on policy preferences because of the policy preferences. Our standpoint is based on preserving the rule of law and analyzing the law as written.

22:23And when we give our opinion as individuals, we will be very upfront about doing so. Yeah, our position is that in that sense, we are going to be political, but we will also be nonpartisan at the same time. We will never take a position because I or anyone else is a Democrat or an independent or a libertarian or a Republican and make that define the standpoints that we take. We're sort of agnostic about those political parties, often agnostic about politicians themselves. And it has been often the case that we will cover Democratic politicians and Democratic issues and explain that, hey, you know, Bob Menendez looks pretty guilty of corruption and that's a bad thing.

23:08And it's a good thing that he was convicted of those crimes. It's a super bad thing that this president has pardoned a bunch of politicians who were convicted of corruption and his friends and donors who have been pardoned. You don't think you're a lefty hack for saying that? Yeah. Just to be clear, I do not think so. I mean, what you were saying as you were talking, it very much is reminiscent of a lot of the criticism that Wired has gotten in the last couple of years. So I hear exactly what you're saying. I mean, we're trying to cover the news. This is an extreme version of covering the news.

23:43You know what I mean? And there will be people who are very upset about any accountability journalism that is done vis-a-vis the Trump administration in corruption or illegal behavior and any of that stuff is just anathema to them. Yeah. I mean, to paraphrase William Gibson, the crimes are not evenly distributed. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, or charitably, the controversies are not equally distributed. So, you know, when Joe Biden left office and pardoned his son and members of his family, I felt that that was a breach of norms, if not a breach of law. And we covered that in much the same way we have covered the Trump administration.

24:20But the thing is, you know, Joe Biden, who many people have called sleepy Joe Biden, didn't do all that much controversial stuff as president. And so it's one of those examples of sort of correlation not equaling causation. The reason we didn't cover very many things in the Biden administration is because there weren't that many legally controversial things in comparison to the absolute deluge that we are facing in this particular Trump administration. And frankly, you know, as we got towards the end of the first Trump administration and especially the facts that gave rise to his two impeachments, the trend was was coming.

24:58But at the same time, given the information ecosystem that we have, I can understand people seeing the correlation and the sort of lack of time spent on Biden and his surrogates and the sheer abundance of time spent on this administration and their surrogates. you know people are going to draw the conclusions that we that they draw and all we can do is put forth the facts as we understand them much as we do in a legal briefing where we have a fact section and then we get into the legal analysis and you know it's sad that we are not living in a world where we tend to share the same factual universe but you know there's only so much that we can do and we try and stay in our lane of of factual and legal analysis solutions to the overall news and media ecosystem, you'll need a different guest for that.

25:49Well, you have built, you know, something of a YouTube empire. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about that. How has YouTube, you alluded earlier, you talked a little bit about the algorithm, the famous YouTube algorithm. We think a lot about that at Wired. How has YouTube changed? You know, it has become more professionalized, for sure. I happen to think that the YouTube algorithm, as much as we bemoan being, you know, under the thumb of algorithms on all of the different platforms, the YouTube algorithm is the best. And the idea that if you are putting out good content and by good, I mean content that people want to see, I guess we can debate the merits of some of the content that's being pushed out there.

26:29If you're putting out content that people want to see, the algorithm will make sure that people see it. Their overall guide is user enjoyment. It is not necessarily keeping people on the platform, although that is a huge part of it. But really, I don't think the algorithm has changed all that much so much as the people who remain on the algorithm have just had a decade or so of experience to know what works and what doesn't. And you're seeing a sort of professional middle class emerge where more people have video editors now, more people have hired writers. Certainly, I'm sure AI has made the scripts that people use much better than they used to be, or at least more towards the mean, if not necessarily original.