Who Reads Entire Lawsuits for Fun?

Everywhere I look on social media, disembodied heads float in front of legal documents, narrating them line by line. Sometimes they linger on a specific sentence. Mostly they just read and read.

One content creator, who posts videos under the username I’m Not a Lawyer But, recently made a seven-minute TikTok in which she highlighted the important sentences from Drake’s 81-page defamation complaint against Universal Music Group. Another described herself in a recent video as “literally reading through the receipts of Justin Baldoni’s 179-page lawsuit,” referring to one stage of a complicated legal battle between Baldoni and his It Ends With Us co-star, Blake Lively, which is the hot legal case of the moment. The threads of this conflict are too knotted for me to fully untangle here, but the dispute began in December with Lively accusing Baldoni of inappropriate on-set behavior and of a secret social-media campaign against her. It became chaotic—and ripe for play-by-play commentary—in February when Baldoni, who has denied Lively’s allegations, launched a website with the URL thelawsuit.info to tell his side of the story.

The creators I’m seeing have loyal, long-term audiences and sell T-shirts and water bottles emblazoned with obscure references. They go by names such as Lawyer You Know and Legal Bytes (“Explaining the law one bite at a time!”) and sometimes appeal to expertise, usually by proving that they are actual attorneys. For some, though, their bona fides are looser: “I’m not an attorney, but I was raised by attorneys,” one creator said in a recent video.

The popularity of this material—a kind of lawyerly ASMR—has surprised even some of the people who make it. “It seems odd to us,” Stewart Albertson, one half of the podcast Ask 2 Lawyers, told me. He and his co-host, Keith Davidson, in fact are lawyers, and sometimes get 100,000 views on lengthy videos in which they go through a legal motion line by line. They’ve asked the audience if they should go faster and skip over some things. The commenters say no. They love monotony and minutiae. “People talk about, ‘Oh, I could go to sleep to these guys,’” Albertson told me. These are words of affection. He and Davidson know that because the commenters have also asked them to make Ask 2 Lawyers merch (specifically, they would like coffee mugs that say “12(b)(6)” on them, in reference to a type of legal motion filed by Blake Lively).

Albertson and Davidson spent more than a decade making marketing videos explaining trust and estate law, their firm’s speciality. Now they mostly make what they call educational content in which they explain high-profile legal disputes. They started with a series on a dramatic saga involving Tom Girardi, the ex-husband of one of the women on Bravo’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. (Girardi was famous for his heroism in the Erin Brockovich case; he is now infamous for having been convicted of embezzlement and wire fraud, as well as for the way his criminal activity affected the fascinating women of RHOBH.) Although the topics are salacious, the two lawyers’ videos are, with all due respect, breathtakingly boring. “You know, we’re kind of bringing calm to chaos,” Albertson said. “Maybe that’s what speaks to people.”

[Read: What the JFK file dump actually revealed]

That’s part of it, but it’s also the simple allure of stacks of papers. Markos Bitsakakis, a 25-year-old TikTok creator from Toronto who also runs an herbal-honey company, sometimes gets 1 million likes on a video in which he flips through huge dossiers the entire time he is talking. (He has so far published 12 installments of a series titled “The Downfall of Blake Lively & Ryan Reynolds.”) He’ll explain to the viewers that he’s just spent nine hours with one document, or that he’s recording at two in the morning because he has been reading for so long. His followers joke that a printer must, as the saying goes, hate to see him coming. “I have like a million files,” he told me. “Mentally, I’m 45 years old,” he added, to explain why he prefers hard copies to PDFs. The way that he dramatizes his work situates him in an online tradition of romanticizing studying and research (especially when they’re done alone). “Lucky for you guys I never travel anywhere without my files,” he said at the start of a video he recorded while on a trip.  

Celebrity lawsuits have always been followed in detail by tabloids and gossip bloggers, and our reality-TV culture has been fascinated for some time with the idea of “receipts”—proof of malfeasance, often in the form of text messages or screenshots. But this is newer. Amateur legal analysis is now a whole category of content creation, and thick, formal documents are the influencers’ bread and butter.

These creators often present a very internet-age populist message alongside their analysis—many of the videos allow for the possibility that anyone can become an expert simply by having the commitment to read and keep reading the things that they are able to access freely online. Another of their stated commitments is to the notion of transparency, which helps explain why many of the same creators have expressed an interest in the National Archives’ recent dump of files pertaining to the John F. Kennedy assassination. Of course, some of the draw is gossip. But to a significant degree, I think the draw really is files.

Files are never-ending stories—or at least they can feel that way when a case drags on, providing a new flurry of paperwork week after week. Katy Hoffman, a 32-year-old in Kansas City, follows CourtListener and PacerMonitor for updates on the Baldoni-Lively case and told me that this is effectively her unwinding ritual. Instead of watching TV or scrolling Instagram at night, she’ll read whatever is new. “I try to maintain a good balance,” she said. That last hour of the day that everyone spends doing something pointless is the one she spends on this, she told me. (She also makes her own videos sometimes, though her audience is quite small.)

Similarly, Julie Urquhart, a 49-year-old teacher from New Brunswick, Canada, told me that she spends much of her free time reading court documents and then making short TikTok videos about them. “I’ve read everything you can on this case,” she told me. “All the lawsuits, multiple times.” She loved working at a radio station in college, so this is a hobby that can satisfy the same impulse to research and then broadcast, even if to a tiny audience. As with many other creators, Urquhart has recently focused on the Baldoni lawsuit, and it has caused her some grief: She takes Lively’s side, which she says has made her videos less popular and led people to be furious with her in the comments.

Here is where content about files becomes less fun. Particularly if you look at the comment sections, you’ll see a lot of vitriol against Lively—visible in much the same way as was vitriol against Amber Heard during the Johnny Depp trial or Evan Rachel Wood during her dispute with Marilyn Manson. Most of the creators I spoke with insisted that misogyny is not a factor in the success of their videos or in their own presentation of the facts, but this is not totally convincing. In 2020, I wrote about the rise of conspiracy theories about celebrities allegedly faking their pregnancies, which were transparently the product of resentment toward famous people and other elites, women especially, and I see quite a bit of that here as well. Commenters often express that they are tired of being “manipulated” by such people.

[Read: How a fake baby is born]

This is not to say that content about the Baldoni-Lively case is inherently toxic. In fact, it’s likely that these lawsuit influencers have had success with it because it’s fairly middle-of-the-road: mysterious, but not acutely morbid or upsetting like true crime can be. As Bitsakakis put it, the topic is “dramatic and exciting and salacious, but it isn’t necessarily as serious as nuclear war.” He thinks that he’s been rewarded by the TikTok algorithm for hitting that sweet spot. There are other legal topics he’d like to “investigate,” such as the Luigi Mangione case and the Sean “Diddy” Combs allegations, but those things may be just a little too dark to be pushed out into the main feed by the powerful recommendation engine. (For the same reason, many TikTok creators reference Blake Lively’s claims by saying “SH” rather than “sexual harassment.”)

The broad interest in this case—and its many files—has made for some strange bedfellows. Recently, New York magazine published a story on self-described liberals winding up on the YouTube page of the right-wing influencer Candace Owens, who dabbles in conspiracy theories and is currently working on a YouTube series trying to prove that Brigitte Macron was born a man, because they’re impressed by her ample Baldoni-Lively coverage. Owens is explicitly anti-#MeToo and sells Anti-Feminist baseball caps in her merch store, but viewers who don’t share her politics reportedly still enjoy watching her go through lots of legal documents and show her work. “I read them myself,” she told me. “I sit down with a pen, mark things up, use stickies, little different-colored stickies if I have questions, like for my lawyer, and he’ll explain things to me.”

These videos, as well as ones in which Owens speculates about whether Ryan Reynolds is gay, get millions of views. When I told her that I found it odd that so many people were interested in what amounted to a workplace dispute, she rejected the characterization. It was bigger than that, because it represented a shift in the way that people consume information, she told me. They’re more trusting now of online content creators who will present everything—all of the documents—than they are of traditional journalists, whom they perceive as being inappropriately possessive and aloof. “I’m very excited to see that both the left and the right are agreeing, finally, that we should really be removing a lot of the authority that we gave to the mainstream media to tell us what to think about other people,” she said. “I think it’s great. I think it’s brilliant.”

This was a sentiment I heard frequently from creators and saw often in the comments on their videos—people expressed a vaguely paranoid feeling that raw information is being deliberately kept away from them by reporters who hoard or hide it so that they can maintain their own power. It’s not an accurate understanding of the current state of journalism, but it is a popular one, and it helps explain the allure of reams of court documents. Davidson told me that the audience for Ask 2 Lawyers appreciates the granular level of detail that he and Albertson provide because it indicates that they are intelligent and curious enough to understand.

“We don’t talk down to them,” he said. “We don’t try to make them feel like, We know and you don’t. We’re here to give you the information, and you make up your own mind on it.” Clearly, people are really, really into that.