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Devin Stone Never He aims to become one of the most popular legal analysts on the Internet. Instead, he was supposed to follow a predictable path: graduate, delve into big law, make a partner, and spend the next several decades enjoying a traditionally successful career as a lawyer.
But a bout of burnout early in Stone’s career led him to that YouTubeHe began publishing explanatory videos under the name Legal Eagle. Stone’s channel, which now has nearly 4 million followers, started out very thinly, with videos analyzing legal representation in popular TV shows and movies becoming early audience favorites. While those have turned him into a prominent online influencer — yes, there’s at least one for just about everything these days — Stone has recently become both a beloved and hated figure for his prolific video captions in which he explains the various legal quagmires of the Trump presidency and the constitutional crises they are creating.
I think what Stone is doing now is something akin to public service journalism in a YouTube-enhanced shell: He and his team publish up to three videos a week explaining everything from FCC oversight to Trump’s invasion of Venezuela, often reaching more than half a million viewers in a single episode.
Stone, who is still a practicing attorney and teaches at Georgetown University, sat down with me to talk about the unique career he’s built for himself—and the particularly fraught legal moment in which Americans find themselves. In our conversation, he describes the explosion of legal crises generated by the Trump administration, talks about building a business on the back of YouTube’s almighty algorithm, and explains why he worries that an entire generation might see unprecedented political behavior as stakes on the table.
Katie Drummond: With me now is the legal eagle himself, Devin Stone. Devin, hi.
Devin Stone: Thanks for having me.
I wanted to start by letting our audience know that you are a real practicing attorney. You are also a law professor at Georgetown University. You also have a very popular YouTube channel, so I’m trying to explain how you get it all done. But first, what made you veer from the traditional legal path to YouTube?
You spend a lot of years working at a very large national law firm, where you get the best training in the world, and then when the time comes that you’re promoted to partner, you realize that you’re completely burned out and that it would be more fun to just make videos and put them online.
You are committing a lot of serious legal violations on your channel. I want to talk about that, but first I want to talk about the fun stuff that you do, like analyzing legal representation as it appears in film or on TV, like in Suits. I’m curious, who gets it right? Have you seen some really high integrity examples?
Oh yes definitely. I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t enjoy silly photography.
Of course of course. For the record, I guess Suits Probably one of my favorite TV shows.
Okay, I’ll tread lightly. Suits I wouldn’t put it on my list.
Loss.
I would say the most memorable TV show is You’d better call Saul.
They really did their homework in terms of making sure that what they were doing was legally accurate. Honestly, I don’t think the show needs that. They could have taken much more liberties than they already did. But honestly, as a lawyer I’m watching Very bad And watching the adventures of Saul Goodman, I felt another layer of enjoyment. A lot of the toil of litigation, you know, pushing newspapers all day and doing a lot of legal research, they actually did a lot of those things. The problems they were dealing with seemed really real, where someone would spend, you know, 12, 13 hour days in front of a computer looking at code.