The Internet’s Favorite Lawyer Says We’re Living Through ‘Multiple Watergates per Week’

Devin Stone never intended to become one of the internet’s most recognizable legal analysts. Instead, he was supposed to follow a predictable path: graduate, grind it out in Big Law, make partner, and spend the next several decades enjoying a conventionally successful career as a lawyer.

But a bout of burnout early in Stone’s career led him to YouTube, where he started publishing explainer videos under the name Legal Eagle. Stone’s channel, which now boasts nearly 4 million followers, started out pretty fluffy, with videos dissecting legal representations on popular TV shows and movies becoming an early audience favorite. While those turned him into a prominent online influencer—yes, there’s at least one for pretty much everything these days—Stone has more recently become a figure both beloved and detested for his prolific video explainers of the Trump presidency’s various legal quagmires and the constitutional crises they’re creating.

What Stone now does, I would argue, is something closer to public service journalism in a YouTube-optimized wrapper: He and his team publish upward of three videos a week unpacking everything from FCC censorship to Trump’s invasion of Venezuela, and often reach more than half a million viewers with a single episode.

Stone, who remains a practicing lawyer and teaches at Georgetown University, sat down with me to talk about the unique career he’s built for himself—and the particularly precarious legal moment Americans find themselves in. In our conversation, he describes the explosion of legal crises wrought by the Trump administration, talks about building a business off the back of YouTube’s omnipotent algorithm, and explains why he worries that an entire generation may come to see unprecedented political behavior as table stakes.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Here with me now is the Legal Eagle himself, Devin Stone. Devin, welcome.

DEVIN STONE: Thanks for having me.

I wanted to start by letting our audience know that 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 how you get all of this done. But first, what made you deviate from a more conventional lawyer path to YouTube?

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, you realize you are completely burned out and that it would be more fun to just make videos and post them to the internet.

You do a lot of very serious legal breakdowns on your channel. I want to talk about those, but first I want to talk about the fun stuff you do, like breaking down legal representations as they appear in film or on TV, like on Suits. I'm curious, who's getting it right? Have you seen some really high-integrity examples?

Oh yeah, for sure. And I don't want to give the impression that I don't enjoy a ridiculous portrayal.

Of course, of course. For the record, I think Suits is probably one of my favorite TV shows.

OK, I'll tread lightly. Suits is not gonna make it into my list.

Bummer.

I would say that the TV show that stands out the most is Better Call Saul.

They 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 Saul Goodman, I had another layer of enjoyment. So much of the drudgery of litigation, you know, pushing papers all day long and doing a lot of legal research, they actually did a lot of that stuff. 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.

Then I would say the movie that almost every lawyer, myself included, would say really gets it right, is My Cousin Vinny.

That is a throwback.

I mean, it obviously features a hapless Joe Pesci getting his way through the legal system and learning in real time as the audience does. The things they do in that movie are not only incredibly accurate, but are unbelievably entertaining as well.

People in trial advocacy classes will look at 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.

Obviously I'm disappointed to hear that the profession of law is not just sexy people flirting and looking incredible. That's too bad. But who are the egregious offenders out there? Are there shows just putting out nonsense legalese into the universe?

Oh yeah. More often than not that's the case. Kim Kardashian's new show [All’s Fair].

I 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. But it is not legally accurate. And it's funny because that show purports to take place in my old office in Century City in Los Angeles.

No way!

It’s physically impossible for the sets to exist in the buildings that they claim that 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 risible. Actually, a lot of it deals with divorce law, and I reached out to some divorce lawyer friends and, I mean, they were just falling out of their chairs. The things were so ridiculous.

It's too bad, because isn't she a lawyer?

No, not yet. Looking back and taking stock of the Legal Eagle channel, one of the first videos that I did in talking about legal news was talking about how Kim Kardashian was taking the time and going through this really unusual route of becoming a lawyer.

Which is very admirable. Just to be clear.

Yeah, I agree. You know, she comes from a family of lawyers, and she's very passionate about criminal justice reform, and I laud her for that. But 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.

Oh, Kim. It's time to focus. You gotta pass that bar.

You have a lot of fun, but you are also operating in a really unprecedented context right now when we talk about the United States and the political environment, and there's a lot of that [showing] up on the channel.

We have some really complex legal cases and legal situations with the Trump administration. How has all of that changed your channel? When you think about what you're going to cover, how you're going to cover it, what has Trump 2.0 meant for you at Legal Eagle?

The channel started as commentary on pop culture and explaining legal issues and sort of dipping our toe into legal news. It was sort of inane things like people who 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 a crime on the International Space Station and whether Kim Kardashian could eventually pass the bar.

Eventually that morphed into wanting to really capture the interest I had in law school, where every day we would learn something new and it would be like, “Wow, that's a really fascinating piece of legal trivia.”

We slowly started to expand our coverage of legal issues. Eventually the lodestar of the channel was, OK, we will release maybe one news piece a week, and we will just find the single most important legal issue of that week, and we’ll deconstruct it and explain it to people.

That has largely continued, but over the course of the first and now second Trump administration, the number of legal issues that reach 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