The New York City Bar Association’s The Law Is Ours series is designed to draw in younger legal professionals, and the general public as well.
The New York City Bar Association has launched a video series designed to engage both the public and its younger membership cohorts into current legal issues.
The Law Is Ours, launched in August, uses 60-second videos shared on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube that “breaks the law down into plain English.” Among the topics the series has covered is AI in the workplace, immigration, voting rights, and White House actions such as pardons.
The series was the brainchild of Robin Dahlberg, a former ACLU attorney. In early 2025 she and her husband, Ted Maynard, were troubled by Trump White House actions pressuring law firms that worked on cases adverse to its interests. An awareness campaign of rule-of-law issues, Dahlberg said, “was one area where everybody might be able to rally around.”
To test the concept, NYCBA convened focus groups of young lawyers and law students, as well as younger people unattached to the legal profession. “There was a sense that the people we were having the hardest time reaching were the youngest segment of the profession—the newest attorneys and others in that cohort,” said NYCBA Communications Manager Eli Cohen. “We were not activating them in the way that we would have liked or expected to in response to current events.”
That research, completed in January, helped the association arrive at a meet-them-where-they-are strategy, focusing on short social-media videos. The association didn’t have the production infrastructure for eye-catching content produced daily. But after a round of fundraising, NYCBA recruited a videographer as well as Janelle J. Romero-Batra, an employment attorney who’d already been creating content for TikTok and Instagram for her own practice.
Dahlberg takes the lead on writing scripts for the series. “Our biggest challenge, we found, was how do you take complex legal issues and reduce them to 60 seconds in a way that the Bar Association can stand behind?” she said
To that end, scripts are checked by volunteer subject-matter experts and association staff both for accuracy and for any possible conflicts with its advocacy efforts. “We brought our policy department into these discussions very early,” Cohen said. “The biggest concern was that we not commit the association to new positions.”
The Law Is Ours is funded through the end of the calendar year, and Cohen and Dahlberg said the association will assess the series’ progress after this year’s midterm elections. At the moment, NYCBA is less concerned with viewership numbers than with whether the content is resonating with the audiences it wants to connect with.
“Social media is kind of a black box—no there’s no formula and there’s no clear threshold for success in terms of metrics,” Cohen said. “That being said, we’ve been able to message on this to our members and received a very positive response. We are starting to do messaging to other like-minded organizations and receiving a very positive response. And so, at least in this still fairly early stage, I would say it’s the anecdotal response that indicates success.”
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