After spending the day on a beach in Greece in July 2024, Savannah DeLullo ’28 returned to her hostel and reflected on the life she was living. It was, she felt, amazing. At 24, she was on a monthslong European trip—skydiving over the Swiss Alps, making pesto in Italy, going to Taylor Swift concerts across the continent—and had built a career as a TikTok star, “Wordle Girl,” playing the viral word-guessing game for 1.6 million followers. But she also felt she needed new challenges. She got out her phone and made a note: “I will get into Harvard Law School.” A few days later she flew home to Florida and started studying for the LSAT.
Attending Harvard was a dream she’d had since childhood. She loved reading, writing, and problem-solving, and teachers told her she’d make a good lawyer. “So I just had in my mind, I’ll eventually go to law school,” she says. Why Harvard Law? When she was a kid, it seemed simple. Going to Harvard would be making it to the top.
Life, however, at first took her in other directions. After high school, she attended George Washington University, where she studied economics. She graduated a year early and decided to take a job as an economic research associate at a real estate trade association while she prepared to apply to law school.
“Being on the other side of the platform opened my eyes to many real issues that the law should address.”
All was going according to plan, and DeLullo liked her work, but she struggled to adapt to the rhythm of it. Her evenings, once full of student clubs and activities in college, were suddenly empty. “So I kind of started just collecting hobbies,” she says. One of those was Wordle.
It was January 2022, and DeLullo had been following someone on TikTok who posted videos of himself playing the New York Times Mini Crossword. “I thought, Oh, I can do what that guy with the mini crossword did, but for Wordle,” she says. Maybe she’d do it for a couple of weeks, to have something to look forward to after work, she recalls thinking. “But then, Wordle just got way more popular.”
DeLullo was one of the first people making social media content about Wordle, and she rapidly gained a following. She attributes her success to being in the right place at the right time, but this explanation downplays the ingenious ways she set her content apart.
Though her first Wordle Girl posts mimicked the subdued manner of the crossword player, she soon found her own spontaneous, high-energy style. She was strategic in how she built her channel, securing brand deals, collaborating with other influencers, and featuring cameos from stars like Ed Sheeran and Joe Jonas. In addition to the deals, DeLullo made money from TikTok, which pays creators a portion of its ad-generated revenue. It also came with an education she hadn’t expected: a front-row seat to the business side of social media.
A year and a half after becoming Wordle Girl, DeLullo was making enough money that she started thinking about leaving her nine-to-five job. She wanted time to study for the LSAT and to travel, but she also was terrified of letting go of a steady paycheck and feared others would regard her as an unserious person if she left.
“I was a person who did not take any risks,” she says. She decided to frame her departure—both to herself and to everyone else—as a temporary pause before law school.
During that pause, as she toured Europe, Asia, and the U.S. and grew her platform, she learned to run her own business, to manage the unknown as a solo traveler—and to maintain perspective about her job as a content creator. She remembers riding a motorcycle through remote villages in northern Vietnam and being reminded of the important things in life: “It really doesn’t matter what someone commented on my TikTok today. The world is so much bigger than that,” she says.
Once during her travels, a waiter told her that he’d been watching her content for years, and it had inspired him to post his own Wordle videos. That, plus the many times she’s met girls who told her they watch her videos and look up to her, highlighted to DeLullo “how my actions matter, and that I want to go beyond just making videos to hopefully have a positive impact on people in other ways through a career in the law,” she says.
DeLullo also saw and experienced the perils of being a woman online. “Basically every female creator I know has dealt with people making and posting AI-generated fake content of them,” she says. It troubled her that teenage girls were being targeted, too. Moreover, she has taken note of the volume of content telling girls “they’re not good enough, or ‘you need to buy this product.’” She realized that she had the opportunity to offer them an online experience “that is very much separated from all of that.”
She’d always known she wanted to go to law school; now she knew why. “Through my social media career,” she says, “I realized that I am really interested in exploring internet and technology law. Being on the other side of the platform opened my eyes to many real issues that the law should address.”
“People at Harvard were the most excited about learning and about sharing ideas and doing good work.”
For example, she saw how platforms reward controversy and outrage with attention and money: “The same mechanism that rewards me for a dramatic Wordle loss is rewarding someone else for spreading a conspiracy theory. And most people watching don’t see that the person they follow is often getting paid by outside organizations or the platform itself for what they post.”
Almost exactly a year after DeLullo resolved to get into Harvard Law, she was once again traveling in Greece when her phone rang. The caller ID read “Cambridge, MA.” Receiving the offer of admission was a poignant moment, she says. Without the confidence she’d gained from solo travel and being an entrepreneur, she wonders if she’d have applied. “I think there was so much of me that was like, I don’t want to aim super high because I’ll be disappointed if I don’t reach it,” DeLullo says.
Her interest in Harvard, too, had matured. Beyond its stature, the law school stood out to her for its programs and clinics. She watched every lecture on the school’s YouTube channel. “It just always seemed like people at Harvard were the most excited about learning and about sharing ideas and doing good work,” she says.
Now a 2L, DeLullo says that vibe of intellectual curiosity is exactly what she has found on campus. Despite arriving with fears she’d be perceived as someone who had pursued frivolity while her classmates worked in law firms and investment banks, she instead discovered a diverse community filled with people who, like her, simply loved learning.
And her TikTok years? They turned out to be preparation, not a detour. “When I was very fresh starting out, I would get these contracts from brands … and I had no idea what I was looking at,” she says. Concerned that she’d unwittingly hand over rights and end up “ruining my entire life,” she dove in and learned more about that part of the job and found that she had fun doing it.
Being at the law school has deepened this interest in working at the intersection of law, technology, and art. When Taylor Swift’s lawyer spoke on campus last year, they talked about working with creatives and the importance of honoring a client’s artistic goals while protecting business interests that might conflict with those goals. It’s a balance, DeLullo says, that she wants to explore more. Last year, she joined the law school’s Recording Artists Project, a student practice group providing pro bono legal help for the Boston music community.
She’s also drawing on her TikTok experience to examine issues surrounding internet safety. In her first year, she wrote a paper arguing for disclosure requirements when influencers are paid by record labels and in it explained why she believes such disclosures need to apply to other online content, too. This fall, she’s taking Online Speech Governance to dive deeper.
As part of the reading group Youth, Privacy, and Digital Citizenship, she’s looking forward to grappling with questions relating to children and the internet, and she’s taking the Cyberlaw Clinic to prepare for work in the areas of internet and privacy law and policy. She also serves as outreach editor for the Journal of Law and Technology and a teaching assistant for Civil Procedure—and is involved in the Women’s Law Association, the Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law, and, for a second year, the “Parody” musical. This summer, she worked as a summer associate at Gould Cooksey Fennell in Florida.
Though her empty evenings are clearly long past her, DeLullo plans to keep making Wordle videos as long as she has an audience. But ultimately, she sees herself working for a law firm after graduation and then, ideally, working for an entertainment company as their in-house counsel, or working directly with creatives. “That would be the dream,” she says. “Maybe I can be Taylor Swift’s lawyer one day.”
Student Spotlights from Harvard Law Bulletin and Harvard Law Today
