Real Lawyer Reacts to The Social Network (Full Movie) // LegalEagle

With Facebook in the news (again) over breaches of privacy and Russian interference in our election, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg and the origins of Facebook in the David Fincher/Aaron Sorkin classic, The Social Network.

Apparently much of the dialogue from the deposition scenes is taken straight out of the deposition transcripts. It definitely shows. From a lawyer’s perspective, the dialogue feels very accurate to real life. Pretty amazing that they were able to take that dry legalese and turn it into a compelling movie.

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I get asked a lot about whether being a practicing attorney is like being a lawyer on TV. I love watching legal movies and courtroom dramas. It's one of the reasons I decided to become a lawyer. But sometimes they make me want to pull my hair out because they are ridiculous.

Today I'm taking a break from representing clients and teaching law students how to kick ass in law school to take on lawyers in the movies and on TV. While all legal movies and shows take dramatic license to make things more interesting (nobody wants to see hundreds of hours of brief writing), many of them have a grain of truth.

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This is part of a continuing series of "Lawyer Reaction" videos. Got a legal movie or TV show you'd like me to critique? Let me know in the comments!

All clips used for fair use commentary, criticism, and educational purposes. See Hosseinzadeh v. Klein, 276 F.Supp.3d 34 (S.D.N.Y. 2017); Equals Three, LLC v. Jukin Media, Inc., 139 F. Supp. 3d 1094 (C.D. Cal. 2015).

Typical legal disclaimer from a lawyer (occupational hazard): This is not legal advice, nor can I give you legal advice. Sorry! Everything here is for informational purposes only and not for the purpose of providing legal advice. You should contact your attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular issue or problem. Nothing here should be construed to form an attorney client relationship. Also, some of the links in this post may be affiliate links, meaning, at no cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. But if you click, it really helps me make more of these videos!

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[robpolaris]

One of the best quotes from this movie. "You can't win in a deposition, but you can lose."

[Matrim]

Zuckerberg: I’m not a bad guy.

Narrator: He was.

[larafaceroli_]

just as an aside, the “movie star” is natalie portman who was actually attending harvard at the time.

[jakeevara]

Lawyer: Let's break for lunch
LeagleEagle: That's EXACTLY what a lawyer would say!

[sebiieex]

so sad the scene of “.03%” wasn’t included. such a hard hitting scene.

[Redbaron_Gaming]

I enjoy this format.

A real professional talking about his field in a non-condescending manor to my semi understanding brain.

Good job, sir.

[mespn]

I like to believe you're not actually wearing any pants in these videos, just a suit jacket and shirt and tie.

[OwenMorganTelltale]

a big reason for why courier is so common is because all the letters are exactly evenly spaced from each other. programmers use this font sometimes too, for that reason

[queson]

"Not uncommon to have the entire room packed with attorneys" Gotta get those billable hours in.

[figboot]

The Courier New font family could be used because that is one of the only fixed-width fonts. This means that every character is just as wide as the others.
Take these lines from example:


These lines appear different lengths although they are both ten characters long.
This property of a font family can make it quite easy to make tables / charts with solely text.

[ryanm.]

My fav line in this movie is where one of the twins says
“I’m 6ft 5, 220 and there’s two of me”

[justinz]

FINALLY I HAVE SOME KNOWLEDGE TO OFFER THIS CHANNEL!!!

Courier is used in screenplays (and probably courts) because the letters are all equidistant from one another, contrary to most other fonts which have a varied width depending on the letter (consider "l" versus "m"). Because of that, it's very easy to estimate the length of a transcript by evaluating how many pages there are. One page of screenplay is about one minute of screen time. I suspect it's something similar here. You can very easily estimate the number of characters per page of transcript because the font is uniform. Unfortunately, this also makes it slightly harder to read, as you pointed out, because there are bizarre gaps between letters that don't usually exist.

[JMulvy]

YES! MY useless education in graphic design finally pays off! Courier font is a monospaced font, which means that all characters have the same width, it is more practical in documents which contain aligned columns of text so they can all be legible across various platforms and mediums. There are several other more useful monospace fonts available but a trend has already been set.

[pranavharikrishnan]

Another possible reason as to why this movie is really accurate is that both of Aaron Sorkin’s siblings are lawyers and that he has shot a lot of legal dramas. His sister was the person that advised him to write the script for his first movie A few good men

[russellward]

The lawyer missed a trick with the "I'm sure that's the first time someones lied under oath" to respond "Is that from personal knowledge?"

[jamesmcmichael]

The legal stuff is interesting and all but the true brilliance of this channel is the pure love and passion for the law

[wjhull]

Just some quick support: I used to work in publishing, and courier was often used in transcripts because (A) it's serif, which means there are no 'I/l' errors in reading, and each character has a fixed width (IE if you have a row of Is and a row of Ms, they will fill with the same number of characters), which means that the length of the transcript can be more accurately gauged by the page count. Courier was based off of typewriters, which shunted the roller forward with every key press and so each letter had to take up the same amount of space, which is why it's unique--most fonts you see have variable width, so narrow letters will look more 'smashed-together' and can mess with your page-based word count.The fixed width also makes it much more 'neat' if you're manually justifying, which is handy for formatting screenplays or drawing little pictures or patterns with the letters (like Jack Torrance's manuscript in Kubrick's The Shining).

For stenographers, I imagine page count isn't that important, but I imagine from the clip that formatting is important, and at-glance readability is far more important than aesthetics.

[joshua]

Thank God, something to distract me from my homework.

[abc]

Objection! Despite always complaining about Judges not ruling on objections, I almost never see you actually rule on objections in the comments.

[timothyrenuart]

OBJECTION:
This man’s tie is FAR too fabulous.