In January of this year, Gavin Dowd, Alex MacDonnell and Pierce O’Meara, three Trinity law students entering their final year, came together wanting to make the law easier to understand and more accessible to both people who study it, and those who simply have an interest in it. By the end of the month, the podcast Legally Fond was launched.
The creators of the now award-winning podcast reunited over Zoom recently to discuss their success with The University Times, and reveal what makes their podcast stand out.
“Our conversations aren’t scripted, it’s off the cuff – it is a genuine conversation happening in front of people”, explained Dowd. “The guys don’t know the kind of questions we will ask each other in the podcast before we hit record, it’s all live”, added O’Meara.
Perhaps it’s this sense that anything can happen on a live broadcast or, the rapport between these three friends, that has gained the podcast national recognition within its first year of broadcasting. In May of this year, Legally Fond was awarded Best Irish Student Podcast at the YAP Ireland Awards. “We hadn’t seen [the award] … somebody sent it to me”, said MacDonnell. “It was a thing we threw the name in for and it was a nice little bonus in the end”, added Dowd.
However, this was not the first time that the Legally Fond team had been pleasantly surprised by the attention that their podcast has received. Back in February, while on a group trip to Germany, the students were notified that they had ranked thirty-first on the Irish Apple Podcasts chart in the Society and Culture category, ranking ahead of podcasts by Oprah Winfrey, Ray Darcy and The Irish Times’ The Women’s Podcast. “We were having running jokes about how much these RTÉ presenters are being paid, and we’re doing it for nothing, [yet] we can still beat them in the charts”, Dowd pointed out humorously.
This inpouring of recognition should come as no surprise though, given that season one of Legally Fond was filled with conversations about quirky cases and thought-provoking legal concepts. Discussions ranged from the accidental legalisation of drugs in Ireland for twenty-four hours, to a closer look at why it’s legal for an Irish golf club to exclude female members.
Season two promises to be just as interesting as the first, with 12 episodes of varying content set to be released. The trio has revealed that the first two episodes will respectively deal with how judges are appointed in Ireland and a recent case in which veganism was ruled a philosophical belief.
The Legally Fond team also said that they plan to hold their first live event in College in the near future. “We are going to have a live event in Trinity, details to be confirmed about that, but we’re going to have a panel discussion and an audience, hopefully, Covid-19 restrictions permitting”, revealed Dowd.
Season two of Legally Fond launched this week. All previous episodes of the podcast are available to listen to on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
