This past month, I’ve watched some of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial on YouTube.
I’ve seen enough of the testimony to form an opinion of the case, but as I believe the only meaningful opinion that counts is that of the jurors, I won’t be opining here on the here on the case itself. Rather, I would like to discuss how I watched it—via an expanding digital subset of YouTube informally called “LawTube.”
LawTube is a loose collection of lawyers on LawTube, most of whom have their own YouTube channels. Several of these lawyer-run channels are streaming the case live, and they invite other LawTube lawyers to watch the case with them on their channels in real-time, discussing with each other the various elements of the case as they unfold.
Some of the larger channels will monetize this discussion by offering something called “superchats” which allows questions for the audience to be displayed on the channel and answered by the panel. The cost of these superchat questions or comments can vary, with some exceeding $100. Some of the channels are fielding over 500 questions a day.
Effectively, LawTube is a means of lawyers monetizing online video commentary and discussions about the law, sometimes using active legal cases as the vehicle. A positive take on this is that it acts as a means to educate the public on one aspect of the judicial system (it does). A negative take on this is it is the monetization built on the suffering of others (it is). Either way, it has simply exploded, with some channels expanding by 5-fold in a matter of weeks.
For example, the channel I’ve watched, Legal Bytes, went from 43,000 subscribers to over 250,000 subscribers, and it is not uncommon to have over 60,000 viewers at any given time, with many weighing on with both commentary and superchats. Another channel, Law & Lumber went from non-existent to posting videos, one of which had over a million views in a matter of days.
Now part of the reason for this explosion is certainly the celebrity nature of the case. But I think something else is going on: the formation and leveraging of a digital trust network.
This loose affiliation of lawyers aren’t simply connected via YouTube; they are connected behind the scene by email and by Twitter, organically coordinating and leveraging each other’s LawTube content, creating a near exponential growth in each others’ channels.
And what is the glue that holds this together? Trust—but not face-to-face, in-real-life trust, as we normally think of it—but digital trust. (Most of these lawyers have not met each other in person).
Digital trust: Relationships that are created and sustained in the digital space via both social media and backend email connections. These digital relationships are something we all have to some extent in our lives, and it’s well worth the time to study LawTube’s success at growth (as they used the Depp/Heard trial as a catalyst) and apply it to our own networks.