So You Want to Go to Law School: The Backstory, and a Sequel

Remember the hilarious So You Want To Go To Law School video? The genius behind it, Virginia lawyer David Kazzie, recently sat down with The Careerist to share the backstory behind the video (which was one of the 25 most-viewed videos last month in YouTube’s film/animation section).

So who is David Kazzie? And has he done other law-related videos?

As Kazzie told Vivia Chen of The Careerist, he’s a lawyer in Virginia, where he handles disciplinary cases for the state involving health care professionals. (We wonder what he thinks of Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli and his crusade against Obamacare.)

That’s Kazzie’s day job. In his spare time, he writes fiction (like a fair number of other lawyers — e.g., federal prosecutor and novelist Allison Leotta).

So Kazzie presumably spends a lot of time writing and honing dialogue, which may explain his gift for it. But the video was actually put together, Kazzie tells Chen, because he “wanted to take a break from fiction.” He wrote up the script in just two to three hours and loaded it up using the Xtranormal template. Here’s what happened next:

For the first four days after he posted the video on his humor site (The Corner), Kazzie says he only got a couple hundred hits — “mostly my e-mail contacts and Facebook friends.” But by October 14, “the video’s hit count suddenly spiked to over 1,000 in a few hours. I [then] posted it to YouTube that night. The hit count started to climb.” When Above the Law picked it up around October 18, it exploded.

“It’s been a huge thrill to watch it go viral, especially when there’s so much content out there, and it’s hard for an unknown writer to make a splash of any kind,” says Kazzie. “Between YouTube and Xtranormal’s site, it’s over 860,000 hits [now].”

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In case you’re wondering, yes, Kazzie has made additional funny YouTube videos, which you can follow over at his blog, The Corner (or Wahoo Corner if you prefer, to avoid confusion with National Review Online’s well-trafficked and highly influential The Corner blog). We’ll share one with you below.

Apparently the protagonist of the first video, Carrie-Ann Fox, was not dissuaded from going to law school. In this video, she “starts law school at Hunter University and meets with her law student advisor, Will Graham, a battle-hardened 2L”:

So You Want to Go to Law School — The Series! [Wahoo Corner]
Lawyer Behind the YouTube Hit [The Careerist]
Lawyer Wins YouTube Fame with Anti-Law School Video [ABA Journal]

Earlier: How Many Jaded Attorneys Does It Take to Discourage One Law Student?

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