Khurram's Quorum – Ep 059: Samuel Levine on bottom-up lawyering

Sam Levine returns to the podcast as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. When we last spoke he was at the FTC, urging law students to look past the paths considered prestigious enough for Harvard graduates and toward local government, state government and legal aid, so we start with how he ended up taking that advice himself. Most of our conversation is about bottom-up lawyering: how hearing directly from workers, tenants and consumers shapes what his agency goes after, and how data shows where a law that exists on the books isn't reaching people on the ground.

Top Insights

• Sam handed out bathroom cards to delivery workers himself when the city's restroom access law rolled out, and their questions showed gaps the drafters hadn't anticipated, like a restaurant that says its bathroom is out of order but still lets customers use it. He also sat with tenants at the rental rip-off hearings held in every borough this year, and those conversations have already led to new investigations and legislation the agency is drafting.
• DCWP put out a report benchmarking how much sick time workers typically take in each industry. A company whose employees take far less time off than the norm is a strong sign the policy on paper isn't working, and that's where investigators look next.
• A new research and analytics division takes in pay and hours data from delivery app companies, and most minimum pay enforcement now comes from staff monitoring that data rather than from worker complaints. In Sam's view, making sure people get paid what they're owed should be the government's job, not the workers'.
• At the FTC, the subscription trap case against Amazon used resources that could have covered five or six smaller cases, and it returned $2.5 billion, the largest subscription trap settlement in US history. He brought the same thinking to DCWP: a pattern of self-storage complaints led the agency to sue Extra Space, one of the largest providers in the country, and it announced a $1.7 million settlement after a couple of months of litigation.
• After the city set minimum pay for delivery workers, two app companies made tipping harder, and tips fell by more than half a billion dollars. The city passed a law against that design, and the agency has since announced more than $100 million in additional tips for delivery workers in 2026.
• Sam could count on one hand the meaningful bills that gave the FTC new authority while he was there, but New York's City Council passes many bills in DCWP's area. So he blocks out call time on his calendar for one-on-one conversations with lawmakers, and he'll phone a council member the day before a staff meeting so the agency's concerns about their bill never come as a surprise.

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Full Transcript

Khurram Naik: Sam Levine, I am excited to have you back.

Samuel Levine: Great to be back.

Khurram Naik: So I have to start with a quote, a quote from a previous episode. And for context, you were at the FTC at the time, and you were discussing your path and how you got there and some experience you acquired before you went to law school, while you were at Harvard Law. And you were commenting about people pursuing prestigious paths. And of course, from schools like Harvard Law, a number of people do. And you said here, "There were certain career paths that were sort of associated with being sufficiently prestigious for Harvard graduates. People should look beyond that. People should look at local government, state government, legal aid. And this is why you're at the FTC." And fast forward, and now you are in New York leading the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. And so a really interesting, prescient comment you made about yourself. I wonder, at the time, could you see yourself doing that? I mean, you clearly contemplated that as a possibility. But how realistic did that seem as what you'd want to do next from the FTC, in applying the skills you acquired so far?

Samuel Levine: Well, again, it's great to be back. And looking back on our last conversation together, I'm not sure what exactly was in my head. I will tell you, I will confess, I thought we were going to have another four years in the federal government. I was already making plans in 2024 for what I wanted to see at the FTC for a second term, as it were. That did not come to pass, of course. And after the 2024 election, I did need to start thinking about, all right, what am I going to do next? And I did think back, I guess, to the same advice I've given to countless law students that I shared in your podcast, which is that there's incredible work happening at the local level, there's incredible work happening at the state level. And that is where I started to turn my eyes. And even before I started at DCWP, when I was working as an academic fellow at Berkeley, my focus was on supporting state and local enforcement. So I can't say that in 2024 I was planning to return to local government imminently. But certainly when the American people in some ways made that decision for me, it's where I turned, because I knew the important work that happens there.

Khurram Naik: So when you were at Berkeley, what's the thesis you developed about how to approach state and local enforcement?

Samuel Levine: Well, I really wanted to be very practical. I knew what it's like to be an enforcer. I know what it's like to hear from think tanks and interest groups that we should do X or do Y. And I had some sense of what is actually useful. And what I really tried to do in my time in 2025 at Berkeley was give lawmakers, give enforcers really concrete tools and areas where they could use their authorities to make the economy work better. So I did a paper, for example, on surveillance pricing with Berkeley and Vanderbilt. My co-author was Stephanie. And we really focused on, we had a whole appendix to the report where, all right, we said all these things. Here are concrete tools states have right now, without additional legislation needed, that they can use to crack down on pricing abuses. And we really did spend a lot of time in that report specifically looking at state authorities. I think we had a table in there of what they could do. And then we followed up on the release of that report by meeting with a whole bunch of state regulators. We had a convening at Georgetown. We had follow-up meetings with states. So it was very intentional, trying to shape state enforcement and support state enforcement rather than just putting a paper out into the universe, hoping for some good press and moving on. We really tried to build a foundation for something longer term.

Khurram Naik: And so it's interesting, because it seems to me that you have different lenses on how to accomplish the ends you have. So you have certain goals that you want to promote with your skills as a lawyer around consumer and worker welfare. And so you're capable of pursuing them using different techniques, operating at different levels. But I think one of the most remarkable approaches has been this very bottom-up approach that you've used. And in your previous episode, something you talked about was the foreclosure work you did. So while you were at Harvard Law, you were involved in foreclosure advocacy and then eventually ended up arguing before the Massachusetts Supreme Court on a key issue regarding this. But along the way, you had a mentor, David Grossman, who would take Harvard Legal Aid Bureau students around on a bus tour to neighborhoods that were actually being impacted by foreclosure. And so you had a sense of the texture of the impact, where you'd see whole blocks affected by foreclosure. So you could really wrap your head around the tangibility of that. I feel like that, too, was very prescient for the work you're doing now, because something you've underscored in our conversations is the two related aspects of your work now, the departure from the FTC: the velocity, but then the proximity. And so I wonder if you can talk some more about building on those previous experiences, the tangibility of your exposure to a legal issue, and how that's playing out now, today, in New York for you.

Samuel Levine: Well, I'm really glad you brought up David Grossman, my really incredible mentor at Harvard Law School, who passed away a decade ago. There's now a foundation in his honor to support law graduates going into public interest law. We just celebrated the 10-year anniversary. And yeah, one of his big focuses was on bottom-up movement lawyering, and what lawyers can do not to just sort of have fun in court making interesting arguments, but to actually use their skills to improve people's lives. And to do so through a model that makes the client the real principal, makes the tenants, the workers, the consumers the real principals, rather than having a lawyer-driven strategy. And I really do feel like now, being in local government, I've come full circle. I think, you know, when I was at the Federal Trade Commission, we were a little bit more removed from everyday people, right? We were in Washington. You know, I was in this 1930s building in Washington. I was reviewing lawsuits. It was a joyful experience. And we did a lot of good for a lot of people. I'm very proud of it. But it was a little bit more separated from the people we were trying to serve.

Samuel Levine: New York City is very different. It's very much on the ground. When we announce big cases, money back to workers, we typically announce them in a room full of the workers who are going to be getting those checks. When we wanted to roll out a new law giving delivery workers access to bathrooms when they pick up food from a restaurant, I was on site at an organizing center handing out the bathroom cards that the delivery workers could use, and answering questions about, you know, what happens if they get resistance, what happens if the bathroom's out of order. Very practical, everyday things that would never make it into a Supreme Court brief or into an appellate brief, but are the day-to-day ways that people actually experience the law and people actually experience economic injustice. So I really feel in this job, and I think this is one of the beautiful things about local government, a real connection to, yes, let's draft the right law. Let's defend it in court with the right briefs. Let's do all the things of traditional lawyering that are necessary to write and sustain good laws. But let's also be people. Let's also understand how they're affecting actual people. Let's also make sure they're actually working on the ground. And that's been one of the really fulfilling things about this job for me.

Khurram Naik: So when you think about impact that scales, you know, going back to the work you were doing at Berkeley and working with other enforcers, that's rewarding in some way. Is it that you find the tangibility of literally being in a room with people that you are impacting more gratifying? Or how does this play out for you? Apart from the skills you're acquiring, is there a difference in personal gratification between one or the other, or are they about the same?

Samuel Levine: It is gratifying, but it's also humbling, right? You know, I'll go back again to this bathroom card example. The city passed a law that said delivery app companies, in their contracts with the restaurants, need to require the restaurants to let delivery workers in to use the bathroom. Very reasonable law. But again, when I was meeting with actual delivery workers, all sorts of questions came up that weren't necessarily contemplated when the law was drafted. You know, what if the restaurant does this? What if the restaurant retaliates against you? What if the restaurant says a bathroom is out of order, but is letting its customers in? Again, these are very much day-to-day questions. These are not the stuff of cert petitions to the Supreme Court, but this is actually what it means to do economic justice work on the ground. This is actually what is required to translate well-intentioned laws into improvements in people's lives. So hearing firsthand what impact these laws can have, should have, is very gratifying, because you can hear the experiences of folks who had to put up with truly inhumane conditions before these laws were in place. But it's also humbling, seeing that even the best-written law doesn't always contemplate every dimension of an individual's experience. And being able to go back to the office and say, all right, what are we going to do about this? What are we going to do about that? How can we make sure that the goals of these laws actually translate into improvement in people's lives? And I guess that's both humbling and gratifying as an attorney.

Khurram Naik: Can you give an example of something, let's say in this bottom-up approach, you know, something you learned from the mechanical application of some law, and all the reasonable but maybe not obvious applications of it, or potential obstacles to application? Is there something you learned in that process that fed back into something upstream, about a strategy for working with lawmakers to pass laws that achieve goals the city wants to achieve, or enforcement strategy? Is there something that went from bottom to up, a specific example?

Samuel Levine: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. One of the things that New York City has been a national leader on is protected time off. It used to be called earned safe and sick leave, where if you're an employee in New York City, you're entitled to 40 to 56 hours of paid time off, and then additional unpaid time off, again for different reasons. But what we heard over and over again, what I have heard personally over and over again from employees, is that these rights exist on the books. These rights even exist in their HR manuals. But day to day, when people take time off, they get batteries of questions. When they try to take time off, they get cross-examined. They feel like they can face retaliation. They can face even the loss of their job for demanding to take time off. So one of the things we did this year is we put out a report on protected time off benchmarks, where we analyzed data on how much, for example, sick time workers take off in a typical industry. And there's a lot of data out on this. And we said, if you're looking at an individual company in a given industry, and the employees are taking far less time off than is the norm for that industry, based on this data that we're putting in this report, that is a strong indicator that the policies on paper are not translating into actual improvement in worker wellbeing. That's kind of the smoke that should lead enforcers to follow up and investigate. That is the strategy we've taken up to enforce the law in this area. But it's also a strategy that we are actively, you know, proselytizing, encouraging other enforcers, and employers who want to do right by their employees, to study, because it's a very clear example that we learned from our conversations with workers of where the goals of a law aren't always reflected in the day-to-day experiences of people in the world.

Khurram Naik: Can you give some other examples of data-driven approaches your agency is taking? Because that too, I guess, maybe you can call it bottom-up, where you're just, you know, making sense of data. What's the norm, what should we expect here? It sounds like that's one way to use data. How else is your agency using data to determine enforcement priorities or gaps?

Samuel Levine: Well, I think one of the most exciting ways we're doing that is through our minimum pay rate enforcement. So in New York City, delivery workers are entitled to a minimum pay that our department sets. That minimum pay is, and it's more complicated than it sounds, it's time that they're delivering. It also accounts for on-call time, the time they might be sitting around waiting for an order. We get data constantly from the app companies on how much they're paying their workers, and we analyze whether they're paying them enough. And this is a very proactive enforcement strategy. This is an area where workers don't always know if they're being underpaid, because it's often opaque. Workers don't always know exactly how many hours they worked or exactly the formula according to which they're paid. And that opacity is something, I think, that in other jurisdictions companies take advantage of. And the great thing about the way we've set up our enforcement regime in New York City is that the heavy lift is on us. We have a whole team. We launched a new division this year, a research and analytics division, specifically focused on ingesting this data on how much workers are getting paid, how many hours they are working, and making sure that companies are paying them enough.

Samuel Levine: And if you look at our minimum pay rate enforcement, sometimes it comes from worker complaints. Sometimes it comes from companies actually realizing on their own that they underpaid people. And we really appreciate when companies do that. That's the right thing to do. But a lot of the time, most of the time, it comes from proactive monitoring by our staff to make sure that workers are getting paid what they deserve. And by the way, I really think that's a model for governance, a model where the burden isn't on working people. The burden is frankly on the government to make sure that people are getting paid what they're entitled to. So we're working to ramp that up, to invest more resources in those tools so that we can identify lawbreakers more quickly and get money back to people more quickly. But that principle, that we're going to do our own data-driven enforcement rather than simply relying on complaints from workers, I think is a really important one, and one that I hope to spread to other parts of our work.

Khurram Naik: You've referenced a couple of times companies self-regulating, self-recognizing when they should be doing the right thing, let's say, or following the law. At the city level, are there different mechanisms for carrots and sticks than at the federal level? What are you seeing that's been effective?

Samuel Levine: That's an interesting question. I think, to me, it's not so much about carrots and sticks. It's about what the culture is at these companies. And depending on that culture, you might need to bring out some carrots and sticks. I'll give you another example from the same area of our work. When the city implemented minimum pay for restaurant delivery workers, many of the app companies, well, two of the app companies, not many of them, responded by changing their interface deliberately to make it harder for consumers to tip their drivers. Previously, you could set a tip in the course of ordering your meal. After they made these changes, consumers couldn't tip unless they affirmatively took a step after they put in their order. What did this mean? It led to more than a half-billion-dollar fall in tips for New York City workers. It was really quite devastating in terms of how much it reduced their income. So we responded with some sticks. The city responded by passing a law prohibiting that kind of, I consider it, deceptive design interface, and making it easier for consumers to tip. And we were really pleased that a couple of weeks ago, we were able to announce a significant, already more than $100 million in additional tips for New York City delivery workers in 2026.

Samuel Levine: But again, one of the lessons here is, yes, we can respond with a stick, but it also has to do with the culture of a company. Are you a company that wants your workers to thrive, wants consumers to be able to support them? Or are you a company that, for whatever reason, maybe you don't like the law, maybe you want to get back at your workers, I don't want to speculate, decides that you're going to go out of your way to make it harder for people to tip your workers? I think that's the kind of culture that leads to more sticks. I think companies that did not change their tipping interface, where tipping held steady, are doing just fine. So I think you do see different cultures at different companies, and we respond with whatever tools, be they a carrot or a stick, to make sure that these laws live up to their goals.

Khurram Naik: Why would a company care about whether their workers are getting tips? Is it the administrative burden of distributing the tips?

Samuel Levine: Well, what some of these companies have said is that tipping is a tax and that consumers shouldn't be forced to tip. And I completely agree. But going out of your way to hide tipping options, which is what two of the largest providers were doing, struck me as retaliatory, because they didn't like that their workers were getting paid more. Again, I would leave it to them to explain for themselves why they made that decision. But at the end of the day, we didn't take it lying down. We responded by changing the law. And now you're seeing those tips come back.

Khurram Naik: We've previously talked about how every organization has finite resources and has to allocate them. And I think that's an interesting question to explore, how anyone allocates their priorities, whether it's time or financial resources or whatever. And so you've referenced both workers and consumers a number of times. Between those two buckets, how do you allocate time to those? Is there something you're doing where you've got some policy objective, and on an ex ante basis you're able to say, here's how much time we're going to allocate to workers, to consumers? So much of what we're underscoring here is the bottom-up component, where maybe there are more issues that are ripe for one. How do you think about how to distribute your administrative priorities among these two buckets?

Samuel Levine: Yeah, it's an important question. In so many ways, it's the most important question any agency leader needs to confront, because there are never enough resources to support all of the things that are important for an agency to do. In the first instance, when people come to us with financial issues, whether on the worker side or on the consumer side, we try to address it. If you're a consumer who got ripped off, you can file a complaint with us at nyc.gov/consumers or call 311. We will mediate that complaint. I tested this out myself a couple months ago now. I filed a complaint on my own behalf. I got my money back within a week. Last week, I actually filed another complaint with my own agency. I think it's really important for the boss to know how things actually work. And so far, I've been really impressed. On the worker protection side, it's the same. When workers file a complaint, whether it's a freelance worker who hasn't gotten paid or a delivery worker who thinks they face unfair retaliation, we will investigate those complaints. We have a queue of cases to do so.

Samuel Levine: That said, I think it's also important to not only focus on what comes in the door, but also to be strategic. What are the big swings we're going to take? And for that, I'm always driven by, all right, let's look at all the complaints we're seeing from consumers or workers. What are the patterns? Where are we seeing consistent patterns of abuse such that we need to take a big swing? You know, an example from earlier this year is we were getting a lot of complaints about self-storage warehouses. This is another one where I have some personal experience. That's not why we did it. But it so happens that I do have some personal experience, where they'll lure you in with the teaser rate and then double your price after six months or a year. So what did we do? We sued one of the largest self-storage providers in the country, Extra Space Storage. We later announced $1.7 million back to the city of New York after just a couple months of litigation. And we announced new rules to protect consumers at self-storage warehouses. And again, we did that not because of my personal experience. We did that because we were getting a pattern of complaints. And I felt really strongly, rather than just, you know, finding some small self-storage warehouse and making an example of them, let's bring a case against a large company to show that nobody's above the law, and to show that we're not going to be afraid to take big swings to protect the people of the city. So I think it's really about identifying the problem based on what's coming in the door, but then being strategic about how you are going to bring the case with the most impact. How are you going to write the rule with the most impact? Maybe you can't write a rule. Then how are you going to write a new bill with the most impact? So figuring out what the right tool is, and then using that tool to have the most impact.

Khurram Naik: So for identifying the actor to take on, as you referenced, somebody, you know, maybe another administration, might take on a smaller target to make an example out of them. Is that because they assess there'll be far fewer litigation resources involved? They're just way more likely to settle? Was there some risk in taking on a big operator? Can you talk me through that calculus?

Samuel Levine: Yeah, I thought a lot about this, especially when I was at the FTC, where I sometimes felt, early on during my time at the FTC, there was a certain assembly line culture. And I don't say this disparagingly, but there was a big, you know, I forget what this rule is. I'm sure you'd be able to tell me, but companies respond, organizations respond to incentives. I forget what the term for this is. When you measure something, companies are going to organize themselves around hitting those measurements. And one of the things the FTC measured very consistently over the years is how many cases they brought in a year. And if you're optimizing for how many cases you bring in a year, of course, that is going to lead you to bring smaller cases. A two-person operation, if they get a subpoena from the federal government, they're going to fold, in all likelihood. You send a subpoena to Amazon, it plays out very differently. You know, when we sued Amazon over trapping people in Amazon subscriptions, we probably could have brought five or six cases with the resources we used to bring that single case against Amazon. And if you measure your success just by how many cases you're bringing, that's not a very good strategy. But I was measuring success by the actual impact we had. And what the case eventually did was return two and a half billion, with a B, dollars. It was the largest subscription trap settlement in U.S. history. That's a far bigger impact than six cases against corner stores, six cases against mom-and-pop shops.

Samuel Levine: So I really believe in choosing cases based on the impact you're going to have, rather than how quickly you can put them in at the beginning of the assembly line and spit them out the other end. And I think that's the same culture I'm bringing to DCWP. We might have been able to bring two or three cases against, you know, a one-person operation in Queens. But what message would that have sent to the thousands of people who have been ripped off by larger providers? What message would that have sent to larger providers, who might think that they don't have to worry about enforcement, that enforcement's only a problem for the little guys? I really think enforcement should be based on where the most harm is happening and how you can stop it. And that was my strategy at the FTC, and that's very much something I'm carrying forward in this role.

Khurram Naik: I think the law you were referencing earlier was Goodhart's law, where, you know, once the metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good one.

Samuel Levine: Exactly. Yes.

Khurram Naik: You don't want a metric, right?

Samuel Levine: Yes, exactly.

Khurram Naik: So, okay. So on the Amazon front, of course, I understand the value of going after a large actor. There's a lot of skill involved there. That's, you know, billion with a B, a very focused effort you can have. But also, in places, there are other government agencies that can sue Amazon. And so a question I have is, for an agency like yours, to what extent should you be going after some business in Queens or wherever that otherwise is too small to reach the threshold of what, say, the DA's office or the Southern District of New York might prosecute? How do you think about that? Is there some empirical answer to this? I don't know about what is setting an example. Because when you sue Amazon, and this is just a guess, I don't know, for some poor behavior, let's say, or, I don't need to characterize whether it's poor or not, just some departure from the law. So let's say Amazon's got, let's say, storage lockers. Well, some other businesses have storage lockers too. I don't know the answer to this. Maybe there's an empirical answer to this, but to what extent is suing Amazon a deterrent to smaller operators who say, well, that's nothing like us. I mean, who cares? We're probably going to fly under the radar. Is there an answer to this that you've explored, or how do you think about this?

Samuel Levine: I do think about it. I think about it a lot. I think it depends a lot on the industry. You know, one of the jobs of our department is consumer protection around car towing, right? Getting your car towed. I have not owned a car in almost 20 years, so it's not been an issue for me, but it's an issue for a lot of New Yorkers. And when we go after a tow company, it's not going to be, you know, some publicly traded company everyone's heard of. It's going to be some small shop, some much smaller operation. And that's just what you need to do to make sure there's compliance in the industry. Same with employment agencies, where we see a lot of fraud, a lot of overcharging people. We just have to go where we see the violations. But where I think it's really important to take a different approach is when you're not dealing with just outright fraud, when you're dealing with business practices that companies might believe are legitimate but that are actually causing significant harm to people. I think to make it clear that those business practices are not acceptable, and that was sort of the original goal of the Federal Trade Commission, you have to be willing to take on bigger players.

Samuel Levine: You know, going back to Amazon, for many years it was the norm in this country, in our economy, especially the last decade, decade and a half, that subscriptions were going to be really hard to cancel. It's, you know, it's become a joke. It was an episode of Friends in the 90s. It was an episode of John Oliver just last week. We're talking in August 2026, just last week, about the difficulty of canceling subscriptions. But one of the things that John Oliver captured really well in a segment last week is the huge, aggressive actions that the FTC took during my time there, under Chair Khan's leadership, to take on these big companies. And I can tell you that has had an effect. More than a dozen states have passed laws now to ban these kinds of subscription traps that for years companies thought were legal. Some of the biggest companies in the world, like Adobe and Amazon and Vonage, have dramatically changed their practices. Uber has been sued by the Trump administration, and it's become bipartisan, for trapping people with subscriptions. So in this industry, where you had big players engaging in practices they thought were legal, but that were actually cheating consumers, I think it took bringing some big cases to really change cultures. But that's ultimately what the FTC did. And we did it in a way that was so smart that we not only had major victories in court, I mean, we won partial summary judgment against Amazon, but we got bipartisan buy-in for this work, with the Trump administration making it a priority, with right-wing states, red states like Louisiana, making it a priority. So I really think it depends on the industry. If you're just dealing with everyday fraud, maybe it makes sense to go after smaller players committing that fraud. But if you're going after widespread business practices that much of corporate America thinks are legitimate, you can't just beat up on the small players. You need to make clear to the biggest players that what they're doing is unacceptable. And I do think that trickles down.

Khurram Naik: Can we go back to the consumer complaints you made?

Samuel Levine: Sure.

Khurram Naik: What were they?

Samuel Levine: So the first one I brought was about a CVS coupon that I received that expired the same day. It was a $10 coupon. And I did not think it was fair that a coupon should expire the same day you get it in your email. And CVS agreed to give me basically the credit on my CVS card, whatever it was, after DCWP intervened. I currently have a complaint pending against my self-storage company for doubling my prices after one year with them. So that complaint is still being mediated, and we'll see what happens. But again, I don't call my general counsel and say, fix this problem for me. That would not be appropriate. I would not do that. I filed the complaint as any New Yorker would, and I expected to be treated as any New Yorker would. It was funny, actually: when I filed the complaint about CVS, I got a call on my personal phone, because that's the number I used, from one of our mediators. And he did know who I was. And he said, "I usually start these calls by explaining what DCWP is. Would you like me to do that? Or should we skip that and get to the substance?" I said, "Oh, you know, we can skip that. I have a pretty good idea of what DCWP is." But other than that, you know, I was an ordinary New Yorker. And that was very intentional. And I was pleased with the result.

Khurram Naik: Say with the coupon thing, if I got that, I'd be annoyed. Like, oh, this is dumb. And maybe they didn't think that through. Maybe they did, and they're just trying to get me to the store that day. But I don't really care. As consumers, we all have complaints, and I can easily imagine a layperson having a reaction like this. When you have a reaction like this, are you thinking about what the legal theory is behind your complaint? Or do you work back to figure out what the legal theory is? Because sitting here now, I'd just consider this to be an annoyance that I probably wouldn't investigate further. I guess you'd have to have some sort of theory of inducement: I was induced to go to CVS on the basis of the kind of coupon I might get. But then I think there might be some challenges there, because you don't necessarily always know. I mean, like when you get a flu shot. My wife just got her flu shot last week at CVS. And I said, hey, what do you do?

Samuel Levine: Oh, my God. It's the season already? I had forgotten.

Khurram Naik: Just, apparently. Just started. That's right. But, yeah. So then they say, okay, we'll give you a $5 off $20 coupon.

Khurram Naik: And they did. So, sure. I mean, that could be an inducement where, like, hey, you very clearly expected this specific outcome for this behavior. But tell me about your intuitions there.

Samuel Levine: Well, in this particular case, I did have a legal theory, which was that I'm a CVS Plus member, whatever the rewards program is. And you're supposed to get a coupon every month for the month, and I was getting the coupon for one day. So it was simply, in my view, which apparently they credited, not honoring their contractual commitment. But I would make a broader point, which I think many Americans, New Yorkers, maybe don't fully appreciate, which is one of the amazing themes about consumer protection. You know, I talked about earlier with subscription traps. Companies thought it was legal. Even though deceptive practices are prohibited, companies just thought it was legal because they said there wasn't some law specifically telling them that they couldn't make people jump through a bunch of hoops to cancel. And the FTC sort of had to build the case that this was an unfair and deceptive practice. But that's exactly how consumer protection law was designed. Congress was very explicit and wise in writing the FTC Act to be capacious, to be able to adapt to emerging business practices, to not have to write a new specific law prohibiting every conceivable fraud on the planet. So one of the things I always tell people, and I practice this in my own life, is I think there's a view people have that, oh, if you sign something or if it's in writing, it's legal, and just a general sense of helplessness. But if you feel like you're being treated unfairly, if you feel like you're being ripped off, you don't have to find a law that specifically prohibits it. Like, tell the government about it. Tell DCWP. Tell your state AG. These days, I'm not sure how useful it is to tell the federal government anymore. But certainly tell your local government. Tell your state government. And we can look at it. Maybe it is explicitly prohibited by law. Maybe it's not. But we're seeing a pattern of a lot of people facing similar ripoffs, and maybe it should be prohibited by law. The whole idea of consumer protection is that it is supposed to evolve to respond to emerging practices. Enforcers only have visibility into those practices if we hear from people. So I always say, and I say this at every event I go to, file a complaint with us. You don't need to look up the law. You don't need to know what the law is. You don't need to write a law review. Tell us what happened to you. Let us do the work of figuring out whether it might violate some law or whether it might justify some legislative intervention, because this just, you know, shouldn't be happening to New Yorkers. It's an unfair practice.

Khurram Naik: To that end, under your approach or approaches you've seen in the city previously, is there anything innovative in legal strategies you're adopting? Can you talk about enforcement strategies, about how you're working out cases, techniques you're using, novel theories? Talk me through those components.

Samuel Levine: Yeah, I think one of the biggest moves we are making, and this is really driven by Mayor Mamdani, and I'm very excited to be a part of it, is building direct feedback loops with New Yorkers. Earlier this year, you can't see it, but I have a poster in my office, we had a rental ripoff hearing in every borough. Our agency traditionally has done virtually no rental work, with some exceptions, I should say. But we really played a key role, and we participated in every one. I personally went to four of the hearings. My staff were at all of the hearings, all five of the hearings. And what we would do, I sat down in, you know, a gymnasium or a classroom, having, I forget how long the appointments were, I think four minutes each or something, with each tenant, hearing what they were going through in their buildings. And from those conversations, and we collectively had dozens of conversations, and they were all compiled, we've opened investigations. We are in the early stages of planning what rules we might want to write. We now have legislation we're working on writing. So, you know, going back to what you said at the beginning, a bottom-up strategy. We are really trying to hear directly from people to shape our response. Similarly, on subscription traps, we are working with the Office of Technology and Innovation at City Hall to create a seamless process for consumers to very easily directly report violations to us. And again, I'm hoping, given the culture change I talked about, that we won't see as many violations, but we're trying to make that very direct. So I really am trying to leverage one of the core strengths of this agency, which is, as you put it well, I think, its proximity to actual people, actual New Yorkers. I'm trying to leverage that strength to make us even more responsive to the needs of New Yorkers, whether they're tenants, whether they're consumers, whether they're workers.

Khurram Naik: Going back again to finite administrative resources, allocating resources, I think there's a number of interesting trade-offs or tension points across these groups. And so let's say for consumers, I can picture a world where there's something that's affecting 10,000, you know, well-off families on the Upper East Side, or there's something affecting 100,000 less well-off families in Queens. Tell me about that. So let's say the ultimate dollar impact is about the same. How do you think about allocating resources across groups that have maybe materially different circumstances and resources?

Samuel Levine: You know, I want to help the most vulnerable people, because I think that's where we can do the most good. If a millionaire gets their $10 back, that's sort of a moral victory for them. And if someone's struggling, getting $10 back means they can fill their cart. Well, grocery prices are what they are these days. I'm not sure how much you can do with $10, but it's a lot more meaningful to them. And I think if you look at our work, there's a big focus on who are the most vulnerable workers, who are the most vulnerable consumers. So take a few examples. There's been a big focus historically at this agency, and certainly under my leadership, on immigrants, immigrants who face exploitation, retaliation. I've had folks tell me, and organizations tell me, that immigrants want to report violations to us, but their bosses will threaten to take them to ICE. Or immigrants who are desperate for help because of fear of ICE are turning to so-called notarios who are actually just taking their money and doing no work. We're in trial with one of these bad actors right now. These are really vulnerable folks. You know, another big area that we focus on does not get a lot of attention, but it's so important to low-income New Yorkers: debt collection, where we finalized this year the strongest debt collection rules in the country, especially around medical debt. Also service of process. This sounds really wonky, but it's a huge issue for low-income people, where debt collectors or what have you will sue somebody, and the people won't get served with the complaint, and they'll get a default judgment, and they'll have their wages garnished. So these everyday things don't make a lot of headlines. They don't get a lot of buzz. You know, you're not talking about them on many podcasts. But they're really important to the everyday lives of New Yorkers, so we prioritize them. So I do think it's important to prioritize the most vulnerable consumers. I'll just add, I also think it's important to not fall into a trap where consumers are being pitted against workers and workers against small business owners. Something I've seen throughout my career, and I especially see it here in New York, is companies really trying to split people. We saw this earlier in the example I mentioned with tipping and delivery apps. The delivery apps thought that they would pit consumers against workers by saying, all right, if you raise the minimum pay, this is a tax on tips. We're going to make tipping harder for consumers to do. Consumers are sick of tipping. What we've actually found through empirical research this year is once the app companies got out of the way, once they just allowed people to tip, people tipped. Because New Yorkers actually know how hard it is to be a delivery worker in this city. They know that during the blizzards in February, delivery workers are some of the only folks out there on our streets getting warm food into people's homes. They know that during the heat waves this summer, delivery workers are some of the only folks out there. They want to support the delivery workers, and the companies just needed to get out of the way. So we certainly are focusing on the most vulnerable people, but I'm also constantly on guard against bad faith corporate efforts to divide workers from consumers. I really think there's a broader challenge here to make the economy fair for working people. And that really is our North Star as an agency.

Khurram Naik: I hear everything you're saying. And let's say there's three buckets: there's consumers, there's capital owners, and there's workers. And I totally hear you saying that the capital owners are a third component that is a variable here. But isn't it the case that sometimes there is something zero-sum about doing things for consumers or workers? Because that was actually one of the points I wanted to explore with you. Again, with administrative priorities, being with the ARC, I'm just permanently fascinated with how to allocate resources and tension points where sometimes there's trade-offs. And so isn't it the case at least sometimes there are these inherent trade-offs between things that benefit consumers and things that benefit workers?

Samuel Levine: I do think there are trade-offs. They're not always there. I think sometimes, you know, in the delivery market, for example, food delivery, people predicted when we passed the minimum pay rate, the market would collapse. The opposite happened. New Yorkers are ordering more food delivered, I believe, than ever in history. The market has only grown. Wages have risen significantly. You know, I think you could point to examples of price. If you want to book a hotel in New York, you're going to pay a lot more, probably, than you would pay in Philadelphia or maybe in Boston or Milwaukee. But our hotel workers are some of the best paid in the country. And I think it's okay. It's more than okay. It's right for New York City to just make a judgment call, when we're talking about economic fairness, that if you're a housekeeper in New York City, you should be able to afford to live in New York City. If you're a teacher, you should be able to afford to live here. If you're a delivery worker, you should be able to afford to live here and feed your own family. So you're right. Some questions do involve trade-offs. And to me, all policy involves trade-offs. The question is who's going to be at the table? Whose interests are actually going to be prioritized? And I think what you see with this administration is a real commitment to prioritizing the needs of working people. You know, if you are a shareholder, and our office is right by Wall Street, if you have money in the market, if you work on Wall Street, if you're a Wall Street bank, you've had an exceptionally good year. The biggest bonuses ever at the end of 2025. You've had an exceptionally good couple of decades, really, if you look at the returns in the market. If you're someone who doesn't have investments and you're relying on your wages, you've not done very well. And those wages have been flat for a long time, even as the cost of education, insurance and housing has soared. So, yes, there are trade-offs. And, again, the question is whose interests are we really going to center? And I think the mayor has been clear that we're centering the interests of working people. And I think that's reflected in how our agency is doing our work as well.

Khurram Naik: And that's something else that I'm interested in, in terms of enforcement. So there's this bottom-up component of you getting feedback from people directly about issues they're running into. And then you're identifying patterns: okay, we've identified a pattern of this kind of issue. Next question is, what do we think is the most impactful way to act on this issue? So this is a way to really boost the ROI of all the kinds of issues you can take on. And so what I'm curious about: you referenced tow trucks earlier and said you yourself haven't had a car in a long period of time. My family takes a lot of public transit. We do have a car, but we use it really for things that you can't use public transit for. And so I'm in favor of people owning fewer cars personally. We rent, and of course it's really common for people, particularly with kids, to own. But I think renting is really underrated for people generally and also families. And so I'm curious to what extent, let's say on the tow truck thing, it could be the case that the city says, hey, all things considered, we want a city with fewer cars, right? I'm not an expert on the congestion pricing issues, but my understanding is, all things considered, the city wants fewer cars in the city. Or maybe the city expects, hey, we want to promote autonomous vehicles. We think that's going to be incredibly beneficial to the city in the next 10 years or whatever. What are the other policy objectives that influence your enforcement strategy, if any? And then what's the time scale that some of these are operating on?

Samuel Levine: I mean, again, I think it really is going to depend on the sector, and it's going to depend on what part of our mission. If you look at what we want for workers, for example, we want delivery workers to be able to have a wage so they can actually afford to live in the city. We don't want them to be deactivated without cause. We want some of the most vulnerable workers to have stronger rights in New York City. We want all workers to be able to take time off. We want retail workers to be able to have predictable schedules. And I'm very interested in spreading that model. We haven't talked about it, but another key thing we do is Fair Workweek. We're getting more predictable schedules for people so that workers can make time for their families, make time for their jobs, sometimes make time for second jobs. So I think it really is going to depend. But fundamentally, it's about making sure people, whether as consumers or workers, can enjoy dignity in New York City, can afford to put food on the table, can afford their rent. And the mayor has been very clear, and the deputy mayor, Julie Su, who was the labor secretary under President Biden, has made very clear that affordability really is not just about prices. It's also about making sure people can afford what they need for everyday life, especially shelter, medical care, food. So it is going to depend, again, sector by sector, on how we're approaching it. But that's the overall ambition for us.

Khurram Naik: I want to also explore a little more by switching gears to talk about your role with rulemaking, lawmaking. I'm not really familiar with rulemaking at a city level. But can you talk some more about that dimension of your practice and maybe a comparison point to what you did at the FTC? Because I think the skills in building coalitions with multiple stakeholders that you and I were discussing before we hit record today, being able to negotiate with multiple stakeholders, I think, are inherent in servicing clients. Particularly with large clients, even if you're a lawyer at a large law firm that has large clients, there's a number of instances where there's multiple stakeholders that need to be addressed. And these might have concerns beyond legal. They may have business considerations, which maybe is an analogy to other political or policy objectives. Can you talk some more about a comparison of the FTC and the role that you had there in working with lawmakers or rulemakers, and how you're approaching that today in your practice at the city?

Samuel Levine: Sure. Well, when I was at the FTC, one of the things we did, and it's very similar to what we do here, is we provided what was called technical assistance for bills. Members of Congress would draft bills, and typically before they were introduced, they would share them with us, and we would provide technical assistance on them. And it was a very high-volume business. We got a lot of bills, and all of our technical assistance, among other people, would have to run through me for approval. And I'll be honest with you, I did not spend a lot of time at all reviewing the feedback we provided on bills. I remember saying to someone, you know, let me know if this has any chance in hell of becoming a law, and then I'll pay a lot more attention to it. I really just felt, given the dysfunction in Congress, that spending my personal time, it's something the agency had to do, but for my time, reviewing technical assistance on a law that doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of passing was not a good use of my time. And, you know, I think it was something the agency had to do, and I guess I'm glad we did it, but it was just not something I thought a lot about. And in my years at the FTC, certainly as director of consumer protection, I could probably count on one hand the number of meaningful bills that passed that actually gave us additional authority or responsibility. Fast forward to New York City, completely different story. We have a council here that passes a lot of bills, a lot of bills in our area: worker protection bills, consumer protection bills. I've been at multiple celebrations this year of bills passing, whether it's minimum wage for security guards or deactivation protections for delivery workers, where I stood alongside the sponsors and the stakeholders to celebrate. But that also means we're going to see a lot of bills that maybe don't make a lot of sense, maybe that are well-intentioned, but maybe don't make sense for us.

Samuel Levine: And I think this is where you really have to be a counselor, in the same way that someone has to counsel their client and maybe say to their client, your goal for this litigation makes sense, but I don't think the strategy you want to pursue is the right way to go. Or maybe your goal just doesn't make sense at all. I've had conversations at times with legislators where I just say, you know, I want to manage expectations on this bill. I want you to understand that there's significant preemption risk with this bill. At the end of the day, they'll make their own decision. But I find when this is done well, it can be very productive. I had a meeting last week with a member of the council who had introduced a very well-intentioned bill. I thought the drafting of it had a lot of problems and was not going to do what they hoped it would do. Their staff were set to meet with my staff. I called the member the day before and I said, look, I don't want you to be blindsided in a meeting tomorrow. We have a lot of concerns with how this bill is drafted. We also have some good ideas for you of how it could be fixed, and we're happy to share them. And they said, thank you so much, I appreciate it. I'm not wedded to any language. I just want to do X good thing for X community. And we had a very productive meeting. So I think, in the same way that a lawyer learns how to counsel their client in a way that sort of moves them along, it's the same thing I try to do with lawmakers: I get you have this goal and I want to work with you on it. Let's work together to get there, even if it doesn't look exactly like how you're envisioning it from the beginning. I have seen in government where the lawyers at the agencies would go to the lawmakers or go to their staff and just say, this is stupid, don't do it. Nobody wants to hear that. In the same way that if you tell your client, this is stupid, don't do it, they're just going to find a new lawyer. If you tell lawmakers, this is stupid, don't do it, they're just going to pass the law and they're not going to take your feedback. I think you have to demonstrate in a sincere way that you share the lawmakers' goals and that you want to work with them to make sure you're getting there in the most optimal way possible. And that is a skill. It's a skill that lawyers use in private practice. It's one that I try to bring to my work with lawmakers.

Khurram Naik: Where have you developed that skill the most? Like, if there's one technique that you've cultivated the most, that you feel you've made the most progress on applying successfully, what is that skill?

Samuel Levine: I think it's building one-on-one relationships with lawmakers. I think it's being able to call someone and be very frank. Like, this is what I'm going to say in the meeting tomorrow. This is what my staff is going to say. But here's the deal. I think people appreciate candor. I think sometimes there's an attitude at agencies to just say, let the agency staff tell the lawmaker's staff what's up. We know their view on the law. And the way that filters up to the principals sometimes is: the agency doesn't want to do this. The agency doesn't want to move forward. The agency is a problem. And I've heard from plenty of council members about problematic agencies that just stonewall them. I never want to stonewall. And what that often means is calling the council member and saying, look, there's this institutional reason this is a problem. Here's what the staff's going to say. Here's what I'm going to say. I'm going to open this line directly with you. I want you to hear from me directly that I support what you are trying to do. I want to get us there. Our staffs are going to have to do some work on the details. But if there's an issue, come to me directly, and I'd like to be able to do the same with you. And I think building that kind of personal relationship matters. You could give lawmakers, and I don't mean just New York City, I mean at any level, the best arguments in the world for why the law is dumb or unconstitutional or unworkable, and they're not going to care if they just feel you're being oppositional for the sake of being oppositional, if they feel you're just trying to stonewall them. So I think it's actually important to signal you share the goal, and you want to work with them to get them to a good place.

Khurram Naik: The one-on-one thing sounds incredibly time-consuming, and you've got to switch gears. It could be very gratifying. Relationships can be very gratifying to build. Is there anything that you found effective at scale? I'm thinking of something like the way that a lawyer might go to an in-house team and give a CLE and say, here's things you should be thinking about for the coming year. Maybe in the same way you can say, hey, here's a primer on preemption, so you understand it, since it's not obvious how this concept works. Are there things that you found effective at scale?

Samuel Levine: I have found that personal relationships in government, whether it's with other city agencies or lawmakers, and this was true in the federal government just as much, are a huge investment of time and are worth every minute. You know, I don't really work from home anymore because my New York City apartment is too small. But when I used to sometimes work from home in D.C., my partner would say, you're not working, you're just on the phone all day. And I would say to him, that's a lot of my work. You know, if you think about where I can add the most value to the work DCWP does, it's not going line by line on a bill and figuring out how to fix it. I mean, I will look at our reviews of the bill. But, you know, I was talking to a stakeholder last week and I said, look, I want you and me to agree on X. And I'm not going to worry about the details. You can figure out the details with our staff, but this is where I would like to get aligned between you and me. And, you know, the rest we can leave to other folks. And I think that's really important. For me, this is a departure, in some ways, from how I was trained as a lawyer, or at least how you get through law school successfully. I will not get into the weeds of technical assistance on a bill. I mean, sometimes I will on the right occasion, certainly if it requires a judgment call or a policy question. But generally I won't. I'll delegate that a lot, and I will use that time instead to build relationships with people. I think when you're a principal, certainly at a pretty large organization like DCWP, you know, we have about 400 people here, it is not a great use of the principal's time to be trying to do all the work you have a 400-person staff to do. I think a lot of the time a better use of the principal's time is to build those relationships with other parts of the government, to make sure that the work coming out of the agency is actually well received, to make sure that the relationships are in place so that we can collaborate with other stakeholders rather than being at odds with other stakeholders. And that really does require engagement principal to principal. And that's why, even though it is a very large investment of time, for many years now I have always included on my calendar one- or two-hour blocks that are just call time, for me to catch up on one-on-one calls with people. I think that's incredibly important. It takes a lot of time, but it's worth it.

Khurram Naik: What you're describing is, let's make an analogy to a law firm. This is like a partner saying, hey, it's not useful for me to master the subject matter of this dispute. What's useful to me is building a relationship with the clients so that we have...

Samuel Levine: Yeah.

Khurram Naik: ...so you can manage around ultimate objectives here, and then my team can sort out the substantive components of this. But I wonder for you, going back to when you were at Harvard Law and taking on this issue around foreclosure and taking it to the Supreme Court. That required legal skills. That was just, you know, legal acumen. Yes, it was augmented by the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau's approach and philosophy around being grounded in the details of actual individuals and consumers affected by certain laws. But in order to achieve those objectives, it was legal skills that you needed to accomplish those goals. I'm not hearing that as much now in your role. I'm hearing that it's much more relational, coalitional, much bigger picture and way less legal. So I wonder if I got that right. And what do you feel like is the legal training you're using on a daily basis?

Samuel Levine: I'm certainly still using a lot of legal training. I mean, we don't file a complaint unless I've reviewed it. I mark up complaints. I mark up consent orders. I review guidance before we put it out. I'm enough of a lawyer and enough of a nerd, I guess, that certainly anything we're filing in court, any pleadings for filing in court, I want to look at in advance. And I will have substantive views and substantive questions about theories we're using or not using. And my team knows that. But I'm also mindful of what my own role is. It is not to the same degree as if I were the staff attorney. So I will look at a complaint and I will broadly say, and I'm just using this as a hypothetical, have we considered an unconscionability theory here instead of solely a deception theory? You know, have we considered looking at how this company is deceiving people? Have we looked at whether the company is deceiving people with design patterns in addition to deceptive representations? So I will engage, but it's with bigger picture questions. It's not where I am going line by line. I used to work with someone at the FTC who was an advisor to a commissioner. And when he'd review the pleadings that the agency was going to file, he would make sure the cross references were right. You know, "see Section 2(a)": he'd make sure that was 2(a). He was very good at it. I'm not going to do that. There are other people to do that. I want to make sure at a high level this is making the point we want it to make, it's bringing the right theory, it's using the tools in the right way.

Samuel Levine: So I still engage quite closely, certainly. And, you know, we also get sued, and I engage heavily on the legal strategy, leading with the Law Department. But I also recognize that at the level I am here, my job is not to be another cook in the kitchen. It's not to be another staff attorney. It's to have general goals for litigation, make sure those goals are reflected in the cases we're bringing, but also make a lot of time to maintain the political relationships, which are, at the end of the day, a prerequisite to everything else we do. We can't do the work we do if the council doesn't give us funds to do it. Right. So I see that as really important. One of my great moments of pride this year was the mayor announcing the largest investment in DCWP in the agency's history, the largest increase in the agency's history. It's going to allow us to hire scores more attorneys and investigators. We're already significantly bigger than we were a couple of weeks ago. We're hiring so quickly. That was only possible because of relationship building. That was only possible because I took the time to make the calls, to make the case for why investing in us would generate good returns for the city. If I had spent all my time reviewing pleadings, we'd have a lot fewer pleadings to file because we'd have a lot fewer lawyers to file them.

Khurram Naik: In working with lawmakers, you mentioned a conversation with a lawmaker about trying to get on the same page on an issue. Can you tell me about a time where there was something that a lawmaker wanted to do that was zero-sum with the enforcement department's goals and you had to resolve that? Or a time in which there were multiple lawmakers who had competing goals that were zero-sum from an enforcement of consumer and worker protection standpoint that you had to resolve?

Samuel Levine: Yeah, I'm trying to think about it. There are some live ones I don't want to say too much about. Look, there are laws that I've seen proposed that, I'm not sure if zero-sum is the word, but I flatly think they're bad. They will not help us do our work well. In fact, they will make things harder. And in the first instance, you try to discourage. It's like stages of grief or something. In the first instance, you try to discourage them from advancing it. But if they're really committed, it's going to advance and it's going to pass. And I can tell you one thing I was actually thinking about this morning: there was a law that passed. I'm not wild about it. And I'm thinking, you know, how do we make lemonade out of this? What could we do with this to actually produce something beneficial? And also, what can we do with this to sort of manage expectations, given what I think are some of the problems? I know I'm being a little vague here because a lot of these are live issues. But, you know, sometimes you have to recognize when you're going to lose, right? There are times when laws take on a momentum of their own and they're going to pass. And at some point, you have to shift to a mode of: if you can't kill it, you try to fix it. And if you can't fix it, you've got to live with it. And then it becomes a conversation of, all right, how are we going to staff this? Maybe we can try to use regulatory enforcement or guidance to steer this in a more helpful direction. You just have to shift into a mode of accommodation. And again, I think that's a bigger skill that I've tried to learn in my years in government. I'm sure it's just as true in the private sector: sometimes you just have to recognize when you're not going to get what you want, and then you have to make the best of it. And that's something I have learned to do. I don't enjoy losing battles. But when you lose battles, you can't just throw your hands up and say, I'm going to let this play out and be a disaster to make a point. You have to make the best of it.

Khurram Naik: My social geography is significant here. So my parents, when they first moved to the US, one of the first places they moved to was Brighton Beach, which is about as far south as you can go in Brooklyn. And so I spent some time visiting there when I grew up in New Jersey. And then I spent a lot of time in Queens. There's a lot of South Asians in Queens. So those are two boroughs I spent time in. But of course, I spent a lot of time in Manhattan and to a lesser extent Brooklyn. And you've underscored this. I think for a lot of professionals, you see the ways that Manhattan and Brooklyn impact, or maybe even for some people, frankly, define New York. But of course, there's other boroughs. And so I wonder if you can educate me or others about a way in which something is happening right now in one of these other boroughs that is going to impact the whole city, from the vantage point of your agency's enforcement. Tell me about what's underrated about one of these other boroughs and the way that they're impacting life in New York.

Samuel Levine: Yeah, sure. So, you know, one of the things that I was naive about coming into New York, and I shouldn't admit this on the record, this is going to sound like, you're going to laugh at me, is how many car dealerships we have in New York City. I live in lower Manhattan. You will not find any car dealerships in my neighborhood, nor will you find them by my office. But if you go out to Queens, especially Eastern Queens, you'll find a lot of car dealerships. There are hundreds of car dealerships in New York City. And a big part of the work we do at DCWP, and this is very parallel to what I did at the FTC, in fact we recently brought a case against the same dealership that the FTC sued years ago, is problems in the car dealer market. Again, if you're a Manhattanite, it's probably not on your radar, because you probably don't have a car, and you're probably not that worried. It's sort of the same with the towing that we were talking about earlier. But if you live in Queens, it's a big deal. And we've been really active over the last six months, seven months now, in our used car enforcement. We did a sweep of dealers, making sure they're advertising upfront prices. We brought cases. We're in a trial now against a Mitsubishi dealer in town. I think this kind of work is probably not particularly salient for folks like me in lower Manhattan. But if you need a car to get to work, or if you need a car because you have kids and you've got child care responsibilities, then getting ripped off on a used car is a really big deal. I should say Staten Island too. It's a big deal on Staten Island as well, and we brought cases against Staten Island car dealerships. So we are very mindful of being attentive to the needs in every borough. I have had meetings with organizations we work with in every borough. Yes, absolutely, including Staten Island. We had a rental ripoff hearing out in Staten Island. I've met with the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce. I really do want to be responsive to the needs of people in every borough, because the New York City one experiences in lower Manhattan is very different than the New York City one experiences in South Brooklyn. And that's a beautiful thing about our city, and that needs to be reflected in our agency priorities.

Khurram Naik: Okay, conversely, people have some information, perceptions, experience about Manhattan and Brooklyn. Through your experience, you've been exposed to the city for any number of years, and now you've got this insider take on it, and you probably see it differently, see the guts and the core of it differently. If there's one thing that people should know about Manhattan, or about Brooklyn, that is not at all obvious, counterintuitive, surprising, what's that?

Samuel Levine: I don't know if this is counterintuitive, but self-storage, which I mentioned earlier, is not a luxury here. I don't want to say it's a utility, but it's a key part of the affordability equation, because for most New Yorkers, including me, if you moved here from somewhere else, you have to downsize. And if you live in Manhattan, certainly, or many parts of Brooklyn, as a middle-class person, you probably don't have as much space as you really need. You need additional space to store your stuff. And again, when I grew up in Milwaukee, I never thought about storage. Storage was something that you maybe used for a month when you're between places. For many of my friends in the city and for myself, storage is an absolute essential. And the way people are being nickel-and-dimed, and more than nickel-and-dimed, the way people are being gouged, has really gotten to a point where, you know, when we announced our case against Extra Space, we got a flood of complaints. What about this storage company? What about that storage company? If you drive along the East River, you know, if you're driving down the FDR, you will see more self-storage facilities than probably any other business. They dot the riverfront because this is so important. And I think the lack of space in Manhattan creates real needs for people.

Samuel Levine: You know, you mentioned earlier that your family sometimes rents a car to deal with whatever needs that. That's another thing I have had to deal with. There are certain things I need to do, and I need to rent a car for it. And I've seen firsthand the way you get ripped off with rental cars. And last week, we just announced our first rental car inspection sweep in more than a decade. And that was informed in part by my experience of seeing how rental cars are not just a thing for tourists, because a lot of New Yorkers who don't have cars still sometimes need cars. So being very mindful of what the specific dynamics are in New York City. And for me personally, being humble enough to know that I'm still learning some of these dynamics. Again, I'm not even going to tell you, I had a joke with my general counsel where I guessed the number of car dealerships in New York City, and I was off by possibly multiple orders of magnitude. I was so off. So it's really important to understand the full lived experience of people in every neighborhood of the city.

Khurram Naik: I love that. Well, look, I think the insights you have are very potent for lawyers who are tangibly thinking about making a move into something in the way of public advocacy. I think we've gotten a lot of clarity around what are tangible ways that you can make an impact locally. For you, I guess, to wrap up here, what is it that you are looking forward to in terms of enforcement priorities in the next six months? What do you expect? You're talking about, personally, the things you're learning, the lived experience and the tangibility of the issues facing New York. What is it that you can prospectively guess? Of course, you'll be surprised about what you'll be learning about in the next six months.

Samuel Levine: Two things. Three things rise to the top. One, I want to get tens of millions of dollars back in people's pockets. I want to show that a well-funded, well-resourced agency, and we're still on our road there, can deliver high ROI, as you put it, can deliver tangible returns for New York consumers and workers. I want to do that over the next six months. I want to do that for the rest of my tenure. Two, I really want to build up the new division I mentioned, our research and analytics division, to not only ensure that we're sophisticated on emerging tech, which I'll talk about in a minute, but also to make us more productive as an agency. You know, when we, for example, have Fair Workweek violations or time off violations, that can be labor intensive: reviewing pay stubs, reviewing schedules. To the extent we can start to automate that and significantly increase our productivity as an agency, I'll consider that a real win. And that's exactly why we're investing in this new division: to make our agency more productive and not just settle for the usual slow pace of government. And the third thing I'm really excited about is I really do want to be on the leading edge as we deal with this real tech revolution underway in our economy. I am not expecting any leadership from Washington, D.C., when it comes to what kind of reforms are necessary to protect consumers or workers. Those reforms are going to have to be bottom up. So I really want to see coming out of this agency, and I think you will, some of the most cutting-edge work to protect consumers from emerging threats, whether it's surveillance pricing, where there's now a proposed city ban that my department is supporting and working with the council on; or algorithmic scheduling, where we're working to expand and enforce scheduling protections for workers; or minimum pay, to make sure that people can actually afford to live in the city. So, you know, I don't know if that would have been a role for a city agency a couple of years ago, but in an environment where Washington isn't leading, positioning DCWP not only as a leader deeply grounded in New York, with deep connections with the people of the city, but also as a national leader in developing the policies and the enforcement strategies to meet the moment: that's what really excites me.

Khurram Naik: I have a bonus question. You mentioned, by the way, something else, which is: how are you engaging with the private bar? How is the private bar something you're learning from, these feedback loops you're talking about, relationships you're talking about? What role is that playing in your approach?

Samuel Levine: I welcome engaging with the private bar. I'm speaking at the National Advertising Division in a couple of weeks. I don't know if any commissioner before me has ever done that. It's traditionally something the FTC consumer chief does. I used to do it when I was at the FTC. That's speaking to hundreds of defense lawyers about DCWP priorities. A law firm partner reached out to me last month about doing a seminar. I said, I'm happy to do a seminar for the bar. My rule is I don't like it to be private. I want it to be open to the public. I don't want any particular law firm to have special advantages. As long as it's public, I welcome meeting with defense lawyers. I spoke to the New York City Bar Association about a wide range of issues, including debt collection and many other issues about our priorities. I welcome conversations with the private bar. The best defense lawyers are lawyers who really counsel their clients to be in compliance. And if I can help them do that, I'm eager to do so.

Khurram Naik: Well, hopefully this podcast will be part of you promoting your ideas to the public. But Sam, it was great to have you back. I keep on learning from you. I, above all, admire your passion for advocacy and your relentless disregard for status. And I think that's a major antidote to so much of the practice of law. But, of course, I recognize, ironically, you've achieved a lot of status in how much you're doing in such a high-profile role. So that's the other fascinating thing, the irony that if you reject status or reject money or these other kinds of things, they can find their way to you because you get really good at something. But, yeah, it's so great to see the evolution of your thought. And, again, going back to how we began the episode, the prescience. So I wonder what foundation we're laying here that we might pick up in a couple of years.

Samuel Levine: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I would close on the same advice, I guess, that I so presciently offered two years ago, which is: yes, please, if you didn't believe me in 2024, believe me in 2026. If you want to make a positive difference in people's lives, don't chase prestige. Chase the kind of agencies doing everyday work to make people's lives better, regardless of who controls Congress or the presidency. And those are local agencies. Local agencies like ours, but New York City by no means has a monopoly on them. I've been in state government, I've been in local government, and there's so many places all over the country where you can really get your hands dirty, actually using your legal skills to make people's lives better. And there's nothing more fulfilling than that. And maybe the status will follow, maybe it won't. But there's nothing more fulfilling than thinking you've actually made people's lives better.

Khurram Naik: Thanks, Sam.

Samuel Levine: Thanks.