Lawyer behind the YouTube hit

Who says you can't be a hardworking lawyer and a creative soul at the same time? David Kazzie, a lawyer who works on disciplinary cases involving health care professionals for the state of Virginia, has proven he can do both. His animated video, "So You Want to Go to Law School," has been a YouTube sensation, earning the distinction of being the 22nd most-viewed video in October on the Web site's film/animation section.

• To watch the video, click here.

"I wrote it in two to three hours and put it onto the [Xtranormal] template," he says by phone from Virginia. An aspiring novelist, Kazzie says he created the video because "I wanted to take a break from fiction."

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]."

But he got the biggest kick when he found out that people close to him saw the video without realizing his involvement. "I told my boss about it, because I thought there might be a conflict with my job, and she said, 'I saw it yesterday . . .man, you're pretty cynical!'"

Kazzie just finished another video about Carrie-Ann, the aspiring lawyer in the first video. In the second one, she's in her first year of law school. Kazzie says he's planning to do six to eight more videos about her first-year adventures in the next few months.

But he also realizes that his 15 minutes of fame might be already up. He says the second video has only gotten about 3,000 hits: "If I don't have a future on the Internet, that's okay."

(Published by The Careerist - November 11, 2010)