Daniel B. Rodriguez
Daniel B. Rodriguez

The goal of a new podcast produced in part by Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law isn’t to create a commercial for the school, said Dean Daniel B. Rodriguez.

Rather, he’s hoping it will appeal to a diverse audience consisting of both lawyers and non-lawyers by touching on a wide range of topics. Or, as Rodriguez frankly puts it in the show’s inaugural episode, it’s about “a bunch of interesting stuff about the law.”

Last month, in conjunction with Legal Talk Network, which produces more than 30 legal podcasts, the school launched “Planet Lex,” a podcast hosted by Rodriguez that features Northwestern faculty and others on various timely topics.

About six weeks ago, Rodriguez sat down with his guests over the course of two days to record the podcast’s first three episodes. The first episode centered on the topic of defending Brendan Dassey, the defendant whose case is detailed in the hit Netflix documentary “Making a Murderer.”

In the episode, Rodriguez talks with Pritzker School of Law professors Steven Drizin and Laura Nirider, who were both involved in representing Dassey and were featured in the documentary.

The fact that the two of the school’s professors were involved in the case put a spotlight on Northwestern that Rodriguez had never anticipated. The documentary — which garnered more than 19 million viewers in its first month after being released in December — has spurred additional interest in the school, Rodriguez said.

Soon after it was released, he said, Rodriguez started receiving e-mails from people remarking that a few of the school’s professors were featured in the show, and then it quickly become a phenomenon.

In April, the school held a panel discussion on the case.

“The room was filled, 800 people, on a Wednesday night,” Rodriguez said. “These were a bunch of lawyers, judges, but also members of the general public who were enraptured with this documentary.”

Because of the attention the school received, Rodriguez said, he thinks more prospective students are looking at Pritzker School of Law. He said the number of applications was up this year.

“If I had to look at why they went up when other schools went down, I’d have to guess that we got some notoriety as a result of that documentary,” he said.

While the “Making a Murderer” podcast episode has a clear relevance to the legal community, Rodriguez noted that the “Planet Lex” program is open to other topics that might not be as law-focused, but still have a legal hook.

“I’m really struck by these issues and these topics that are clearly legal … deeply connected to law, but are of enormous social import and are frequently misunderstood,” he said.

The topics of the two other episodes that have been released so far are the evolution of copyright law in the music industry and an episode that relates more specifically to students by discussing the value of multidisciplinary education. Other programs the school has planned include touching on topics including public corruption, sexual assault and artificial intelligence.

By featuring a wide range of topics, Rodriguez said he hopes the podcast achieves another goal: making lawyers more relatable to those outside the field.

“I’m a firm believer that law and lawyers ought not to be siloed, speaking a strange separate language from other professions and other walks of life,” he said. “The more we can be outward facing as a law school, the more we can engage members of the general public about general themes and issues.”

“This is a small step in this direction, but it’s part of a number of other steps within our law school to be more outward facing, break down barriers and build bridges so we can democratize the law in some ways,” he said.

The podcast “Serial” is another example of a hit program that generated a nationwide discussion and inspired interest from the general public about various facets of law. The first season of the podcast, which aired in 2014, was downloaded 80 million times. It is widely considered to be the most popular podcast in the world.

In it’s first season, host Sarah Koenig investigates and vets the criminal case of a man who was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend in high school.

While Rodriguez admits “we’re not recording ‘Serial,’” he pointed out that “Planet Lex” is similarly designed to get people talking about how the law intersects with other issues.

He said he will consider the podcast a success once people begin approaching him about interesting topics they would like to hear featured on the show.

“We all saw this and still see this frankly as an experiment. Whether it will gain traction and Legal Talk Network will think it’s a value to the legal segment of the community and elsewhere remains to be seen,” he said, “but in pulling together the topics and in reaching out to folks to be guests on the show, the production, and finally, the actual recordings and conversations, has just been a blast.”