Elizabeth Yang is the CEO and Founder of Yang Law Offices and a Partner at OptiNizers. Yang Law Offices specializes in intellectual property and family law, while OptiNizers provides top-tier Filipino virtual talent to US businesses. Elizabeth is a best-selling author of six books and serves as the Mayor Pro Tem and Council Member for District 2 in Monterey Park, California. She holds a degree in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley and formerly worked with Raytheon and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:48] Elizabeth Yang recounts her first entrepreneurial venture selling Happy Meal toys in fourth grade
- [6:30] What made Elizabeth pivot careers?
- [10:30] Balancing motherhood with a demanding legal career
- [15:13] The challenge of managing both a law firm and an indoor playground business simultaneously
- [17:07] Why Elizabeth chose to scale her law firm over franchising indoor playgrounds
- [20:49] Advice to clients to avoid prolonged litigation
- [22:33] Shifting from a law firm partnership to sole ownership and its challenges
- [23:10] Benefits of using virtual assistants in business
- [27:32] Elizabeth reflects on the overlap between her legal background and her role in local government
In this episode…
Many professionals reach a point where they must decide between the security of employment and the freedom of entrepreneurship. But what happens when that decision involves juggling two entirely different careers — and family life?
Elizabeth Yang tackled this dilemma head-on by leveraging her engineering background, legal education, and business acumen to forge her path. After experiencing the volatility of large law firms and the strain of long hours away from her children, she launched her law firm, Yang Law Offices, and simultaneously opened multiple indoor playgrounds. Elizabeth shares how she eventually decided to focus on the higher-margin legal business, how her four-year divorce led her to shift into family law, and how virtual assistants from her second company, OptiNizers, helped her scale efficiently.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Elizabeth Yang, CEO and Founder of Yang Law Offices and Partner at OptiNizers, about her multifaceted entrepreneurial journey. Elizabeth discusses how she built a law firm and indoor playground business simultaneously, what inspired her pivot to family law, and how her divorce shaped her practice. She also shares how remote teams can drive growth and her recent foray into local government.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Elizabeth Yang on LinkedIn
- Yang Law Offices Website | Instagram
- OptiNizers
Special Mention(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “If you want security, you need to take matters into your own hands and own the company.”
- “Family law is like the hot topic — everyone wants to talk about their divorce.”
- “You have to treat your ex with more respect than when you were married.”
- “During the pandemic, our law firm tripled in size because family law cases skyrocketed.”
- “Virtual assistants can do almost anything remotely — and they’ve become a core part of our team.”
Action Steps:
- Explore entrepreneurial opportunities through life experiences: Elizabeth Yang’s pivot into family law came from navigating her divorce. Real-world experience often reveals untapped business potential.
- Diversify revenue through smart side ventures: Her indoor playgrounds provided income and local value. When you identify unmet needs in your community, it can become a viable business.
- Invest in virtual talent: Leveraging virtual assistants from the Philippines helped Elizabeth scale her law firm affordably. Remote staffing can drastically increase capacity without inflating costs.
- Align your business with your lifestyle goals: Elizabeth restructured her career to spend more time with her children. Entrepreneurs should ensure their ventures support — not sabotage — their personal lives.
- Use personal setbacks to fuel growth: Instead of being defeated by her divorce, Elizabeth used it to build empathy, expertise, and a new client base. Personal challenges can become your strongest business differentiators.
Sponsor: Rise25
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John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about how to evolve the focus of your business and also how to balance two businesses running two businesses at once. My guest today is Elizabeth Yang. I’ll tell you more about her in a second, so stay tuned.
Intro: 00:14
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:30
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here I am, the host of this show. And you know, every week we feature smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. And if you check out the archives, we’ve got Netflix and Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, Activision Blizzard, lots of great episodes for you to check out.
And of course, this episode was brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast. We are the easy button for companies to launch and run the podcast.
We do three things which are strategy, accountability, and full execution. And we even invented what some are calling the Wix of B2B podcasting. It’s our platform Podcast Co-Pilot. So if you want to learn more about all of that, you can go to our website at Rise25.com or email us at support@rise25. com and a quick shout out before to I get to our guest to Andy Cheng, my friend of OptiNizers.
He is a great guy. He is my accountability buddy and he introduced us to today’s guest, Elizabeth Yang. She’s the CEO and Founder of Yang Law Offices, and she’s also a partner at OptiNizers. And she earned her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering computer science from UC Berkeley at the age of 19. Wow, did it in about two and a half years.
And then she also had an engineering career working at Raytheon on the B-2 bomber and at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, the JPL on the Mars Exploration Rover. And as if that wasn’t enough, she went to law school, graduated the same year as I. But that is where the comparisons go in opposite directions because I did nothing impressive after that point. But she’s had a distinguished legal career and worked both in IP and then also in family law, which is unusual to hear someone balancing both of those two. It’s not often that people do both of those.
So Elizabeth, it’s such a pleasure to have you here today and I always like interviewing entrepreneurial lawyers, because it’s unusual that lawyers can be entrepreneurial, because lawyers tend to be taught to be so careful and cautious about everything. And you got to throw a little bit of that to the wind to be an entrepreneur in the first place. But tell me about when you were a kid. In fourth grade, you were given this assignment by a teacher to bring stuff in to sell to each other and wise old you. You brought in McDonald’s toys, you got free Happy Meals and sold them to your classmates. I love that, tell me the story.
Elizabeth Yang: 02:48
Yeah. So my first entrepreneurial experience was in fourth grade. Our teacher allowed us to, you know, everyone’s desk is like a little store and we can sell whatever we want. And I decided to bring all the toys I had collected from my McDonald’s Happy Meals, and I put all the toys out and the other kids were like, oh, I want this one, I want that one. So that was like a great experience to help me price out the items.
Yeah. That’s cool. Supply and demand. Like this one I knew someone really wanted I could price a little higher, make some more money off of it. And that’s my very first entrepreneur experience.
John Corcoran: 03:23
Nice. And that was back in the heyday when Happy Meal toys were great. Like, I don’t know if you’ve taken your kids well, your kids are a little older now. They’re in high school, but the toys are not that great anymore. I mean, you used to get some real toys.
Elizabeth Yang: 03:33
It’s not the same as back in our childhood. So I know it’s bad for our kids.
John Corcoran: 03:38
I feel bad for the landfills that are filled with a bunch of plastic. But yeah, at least the toys were good. Made the kids happy. So you did that. And you and you did.
You kind of have a sense that you had a better ability at negotiating with people because some people are really bad at negotiation. So like, what do you think gave you that ability?
Elizabeth Yang: 04:00
I think I was good at figuring out the value of something. If I saw that my customer really wanted it and I could price it a little higher, I don’t even know where I learned it from because my parents never signed me up for an entrepreneurial class, but it was just innate in me. Like I’m like, okay, if you guys want this, then I know I can make this much of you. And I didn’t price every toy the same. I priced it based on how much I knew my customer wanted it.
John Corcoran: 04:31
Yeah. So you end up going into engineering and you spend a couple of years working at JPL, as I mentioned, the Mars rover. You worked on the B-2 bomber systems. Did you have a passion for space or aerospace or, you know, was that something that you were kind of working towards?
Elizabeth Yang: 04:51
I did have a passion. At one point in my childhood. I wanted to be an astronaut. So that’s one of the reasons I applied to JPL, and I got to work on the Mars Exploration Rover. That was really amazing.
But I think the reason I ended up joining Raytheon after I graduated from college was because I really enjoyed the people at Raytheon. Raytheon used to be Hughes and Hughes had a great company culture. And when I worked at Raytheon during the summer, I thoroughly enjoyed the colleagues I worked with. So after graduating from college, I’m like, you know what? I’m going to continue my career at Raytheon, right?
John Corcoran: 05:31
And so you did that. And what were some of the highlights for that was, you know, did you get to see the bomber flying around? Did you know, what were kind of like the, the, the things that you remember from that experience.
Elizabeth Yang: 05:48
So I didn’t get to see the B-2 bomber. That was the main project I worked on. But I did get to go to the Air Force base and got to see some of the other fighter jets, Jets like the F-15, the F-18. Got to climb into the cockpit where the pilot sits and see all the controls. So it was pretty amazing to see those fighter jets in person.
John Corcoran: 06:08
You end up going back to school and you go to law school. We graduated around the same time, which was the time of the global economic crisis. Not a great time to graduate. Yeah. 2007. Not a great time. Well, in your words, what was it like for you coming out into that job market? It was a bit bleak. Not too long after we graduated.
Elizabeth Yang: 06:30
Yeah, but, you know, when I went to law school, I wasn’t planning on becoming an attorney. I was pretty happy at Raytheon, staying as an engineer. I mainly went to law school just to learn about our country’s legal system, so I could prepare for it if I ever encountered it in my life. And then after I graduated and I was studying for the bar exam, one of my colleagues at Raytheon told me that his neighbor was a big time partner at this law firm that specializes in intellectual property. So he makes the introduction for us, and I ended up getting a job offer from that, that law firm, which was very surprising because I was not expecting to get hired since I went to the University of Laverne, which is not a top tier law school, and I had zero legal experience, had never done a clerkship, had never done an internship, had zero law experience.
But I didn’t know that lawyers with engineering backgrounds were in such high demand in the IP world, especially electrical engineers. So that’s why they gave me an offer with zero experience. And I joined the market. But 2007, when I joined, things were still pretty good. And shortly thereafter, like we all know, the market crashed.
The partners who got better offers left the company and took their cases with them, took their associates with them. And you have a few big partners taking big cases. You know, the company just imploded almost overnight.
John Corcoran: 08:01
They had about 800 lawyers at their peak and it imploded overnight. What was that experience like for you? Like it was. Tell me. Take me back to that. Did you come in in the morning and people are leaving? And what was the experience like?
Elizabeth Yang: 08:15
Yeah, it was pretty scary. You know, we would be getting resignation notices. Oh, this person today is my last day. And then all of a sudden, five other people. Oh, we’re going to this firm all at once. So it was people were leaving in herds in droves.
John Corcoran: 08:32
Wow. That’s crazy. And this was 2010, right when this happened.
Elizabeth Yang: 08:38
It was around 2009, 2010.
John Corcoran: 08:42
Okay.
Elizabeth Yang: 08:43
Yeah. End of 2009 till, like, middle of 2010.
John Corcoran: 08:46
So there had been other things that had happened around this timeframe, like Bear Stearns and Enron collapse. So I guess that was a number of years earlier. But others like companies that have Collapsed. So did it feel like you were in the midst of something like that?
Elizabeth Yang: 09:00
It did. Yeah. It’s like you come to work and you don’t know if the office is still going to be there the next day or not. It’s just big changes day by day.
John Corcoran: 09:08
How does that change going forward? Your attitude towards employment, towards, you know, what you wanted to do with your life when such a large entity that you’re working for could collapse in a matter of a couple of days?
Elizabeth Yang: 09:23
Well, I think it just made me feel like no matter how big a company is, it’s not 100% reliable. Like, I can’t just depend my entire livelihood on someone else’s company, no matter how big it is. And if I wanted security, I would need to, I guess, take matters into my own hands and be in the managerial role or, you know, own the company.
John Corcoran: 09:50
Yeah. You had a couple of kids around this time. Your daughter, I think a daughter and a son.
Elizabeth Yang: 09:56
Yeah. My daughter was born in April of 2009. My son was born shortly thereafter, August of 2010. So they’re only 16 months apart. I had them.
John Corcoran: 10:06
Technically Irish twins, right?
Elizabeth Yang: 10:08
Yeah. Not really. There were different years, I think. Irish twins are. If they’re born in the same year.
John Corcoran: 10:13
Okay. And then how did that affect things for you? You know, you have two kids back to back in this big firm that you’re working at. I imagine putting in long hours goes under. And so, you know, what do you do? How do you pick up the pieces?
Elizabeth Yang: 10:30
You know, the timing actually worked out pretty well because when I, when my daughter was born, during that first year before I had my son, I was still billing 2000 plus hours. And that was her billable requirement. And every morning I’d get up early, my daughter would still be sleeping. I leave the house, go to the office at night. Sometimes we would have happy hours to network, you know, build business, build relationships, and I get home pretty late.
My daughter was sleeping, so that whole first year I barely had an opportunity to build a relationship with my daughter. You know, I made good money and I can afford a nanny to take care of her. But I told myself, you know, this continued. My daughter’s going to grow up not knowing much of her mom, because I’d be at the office and working all the time. So if I wanted things to change, then I couldn’t continue building that many hours or working a job that required me to work that many hours.
John Corcoran: 11:25
Yeah. And that’s part of why there’s so few us moms, especially working moms, that work in those types of environments.
Elizabeth Yang: 11:34
Exactly. A lot of the females at the big law firms, they put their career first. They would make partners in their 40s, and then they would start having a family. And by that point, a lot of them were having difficulties getting pregnant. So a lot of the conversations we had with the few females at the firm were, you know, how they were going through the in vitro process and all their complications. And I was like, you know what? I don’t really want to be one of those that focused on my career.
John Corcoran: 12:01
And so you end up joining another firm, a smaller firm. I imagine at this point it gives you a little bit more work life balance.
Elizabeth Yang: 12:13
It did give me work life balance.
Elizabeth Yang: 12:14
But still, you know, I’m reporting to someone I don’t really have control. You know, I could let go of any minute. I remember back at Raytheon, there was like one of my colleagues who had worked there for 20, 30 years, and then right before she was going to retire, she got fired. So, you know, it’s like when you’re working for someone else, you still don’t have control over employment, and you don’t know if you’re going to get your next paycheck or not.
John Corcoran: 12:42
Yeah. So what do you do next? You start two businesses.
Elizabeth Yang: 12:48
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 12:48
So at the same time.
Elizabeth Yang: 12:50
Well, it just so happened that way. The first business was the law firm. Okay. Like you know what? Instead of working for someone, I have enough experience to start my own practice.
Yeah. And actually, while I was employed, a lot of my friends would come to me and ask me if I could help them with their legal issues. But the retainers at the firms I was working for were so high they’d be like $30,000 plus. So I have to refer my friends to solo practitioners. And so I was like, why don’t I just start my own practice so I can start helping my friends and charge a much lower retainer and support, you know, individual clients?
So that’s what I did. And then at the same time, my daughter, my nanny came home and said that she’d taken my daughter to an indoor playground. At that time, I had never heard the term indoor playground. It wasn’t that popular. Yeah, it is now.
And I was like, what’s an indoor playground? I like envisioning a park structure, but inside a facility. So I went and checked it out and I lived in Pasadena at the time. My nanny had taken the bus all the way to South Pasadena, because that was the closest indoor playground. And I saw the model and I was like, this is a pretty easy business idea.
You get a bounce house, you get some toys, a little play kitchen. There’s 1 or 2 employees working at any given time, one person at the cashier, the other person cleaning up. So it seemed to be pretty straightforward. You know, unlike a restaurant where you need, you know, constant staff and people cooking in the kitchen. So I realized there wasn’t a single indoor playground in Pasadena at the time. And I was on maternity leave. So I had a lot of time on my hands, and I took my daughter. We just started driving around town looking at empty vacant spaces.
John Corcoran: 14:44
As one does. As one does. Yeah. With a newborn. Yeah, yeah.
Elizabeth Yang: 14:49
Talk to the different real estate brokers. Got some prizes and ended up finding an empty furniture store that was right on Colorado Boulevard. Great location and really cheap rent. So I used my maternity leave to renovate that space and turn it into a new business.
John Corcoran: 15:08
And how did it go? Like it was, were there challenges in the early days?
Elizabeth Yang: 15:13
There were definitely challenges I didn’t see, including getting the permits from the city. I didn’t realize renovation construction was going to be that much of a headache. So that took a lot longer than I planned. But once the business was up and running, it was pretty smooth. Yeah. But then additionally, other entrepreneurial problems arose too, such as managing employees, you know.
John Corcoran: 15:40
Did you have someone managing for you or did you manage it yourself while you’re also practicing law?
Elizabeth Yang: 15:45
Initially, I managed.
Elizabeth Yang: 15:46
On my own, and then later on I did hire a manager to manage for me.
John Corcoran: 15:51
Yeah. And it’s funny you mentioned the economics of it, because I’ve been to a bunch of these with my kids and I, every time I’m at one, I’m doing the math in my head. I’m like, how many kids are in here? How much do they pay? Some of them are going to buy a snack from the snack bar, you know, and that staff person can’t be that expensive. So did you find it was worth the headache? Was it a, you know, license to print money or is it more complicated than that?
Elizabeth Yang: 16:16
Well, it is profitable.
Elizabeth Yang: 16:18
So I ended up opening two more. I actually purchased one in West Covina and rebranded it to Magical Playground. And then I also opened one with another partner in the city of Whittier. So at my peak, I had three indoor playgrounds, and I had my law practice that I was growing too. So at some point I was like, both are doing great, both are successful and taking up my time, but I need to focus on one or the other.
If I focus on the playground, I can work on franchising it, opening a lot of stores across the country, but then I don’t think I would be able to focus on growing my law practice. And even though the playground was profitable, it’s not as profitable as the law firm. The law firm has much higher margins.
John Corcoran: 17:07
Sure. So you focus on the law firm, and you actually initially were focused on IP. Now, you said you spend about 80% of your time on family law. You end up going through a divorce. Not everyone goes through something like that and then decides, oh, I’m going to shift my practice towards this. So, talk to me a little bit about what that experience was like and why you decided to focus on it as a practice area.
Elizabeth Yang: 17:34
It was just like a supply and demand thing. So I went through a four year divorce. It’s basically like a four year college and family law. I learned everything there is to know about child custody, child support, asset division, even restraining orders. And during these four years.
Family law is like the hot topic. Anytime I’m hanging out with friends, I’m talking about my divorce case. So pretty. Pretty soon my circle of friends all know that I’ve been going through this for four years, and any time.
John Corcoran: 18:04
You had a lawyer representing you during this time, or.
Elizabeth Yang: 18:07
Five different lawyers or five different lawyers, five different law firms.
John Corcoran: 18:12
Wow.
Elizabeth Yang: 18:12
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 18:13
And why was that? Was it hard finding someone that you jived with, or why was it so challenging?
Elizabeth Yang: 18:20
Well, the whole family law industry and in and of itself is a conflict of interest. So if a lawyer helps you settle the case, they make less money. If they help you drag it on and add fuel to the fire, they can end up taking all your assets at the end. Right? So it’s a whole conflict of interest. So to find good lawyers that really just want to act on your interest and actually encourage you to make amends with your ex and settle the case and become friends, it’s really hard to find lawyers who are going to do that.
John Corcoran: 18:52
Because it goes against their own economic interests.
Elizabeth Yang: 18:55
Exactly. Yeah. So if you want to fight those. Okay. Yeah.
We’ll help you fight. You want to file this motion? Sure. We’ll help you file this motion and then. And billing all these attorney fees.
John Corcoran: 19:05
Right, right. So. So what happened next? So after you go through this four year process, you decide. Well, I’ve learned all about it. I can do this better than some of the other lawyers out there.
Elizabeth Yang: 19:17
It wasn’t even a conscious decision. Friends just started coming to me. Oh, I want to file a divorce with my spouse. You went through it. Can you help me with the knowledge you have?
So I just started taking on friends as clients. And then. And then it got so popular that I was like, you know what? I want to add this onto the website as an actual practice area. And back then I had a partner in my law firm.
He decided that it would change the branding and reputation. It wouldn’t be good for marketing. So we decided to go our separate ways. And my new law firm that was just my own, focused mainly on family law and people just there was way more clients asking for family law services than there was for IP, especially during the pandemic, during the pandemic, or law firm ended up tripling in size from 4 to 12 lawyers because the demand for family law cases skyrocketed.
John Corcoran: 20:22
Because people were forced to confront their marriage during.
Elizabeth Yang: 20:25
The quarantine.
John Corcoran: 20:26
Yeah. Right. Right.
Elizabeth Yang: 20:28
Exactly.
Elizabeth Yang: 20:28
Yeah. You end up forcing two people to live together in a confined space. They either realize they love each other and love the extra time, or they realize they can’t stand each other.
John Corcoran: 20:39
Yeah, I heard a few stories. I’m sure we all did. How did you avoid that conflict that you saw in other lawyers as you moved into this area?
Elizabeth Yang: 20:49
Well, I would share my own story with my clients and tell them like, you can either follow in my footsteps and make the same mistakes and end up paying for my kids college tuition. Or you can learn from my mistakes. Be the bigger person you. I tell my clients, you have to treat your ex with more dignity and more respect and more patience than when you guys were married. And a lot of them are like, no, that’s not possible.
My ex is, you know, such and such. I’m like, actually, it’s not that difficult because you’re not living with the person anymore. You’re not spending 24 over seven with them. You’re just seeing them here and there for child custody exchanges, you know, for parent teacher conferences or whatnot. And this is for people who have children.
And so it’s actually very doable. So once they realize that they can treat their ex with more patience, more respect than when they were married. It improves their relationship. And the divorce goes a lot smoother.
John Corcoran: 21:49
So a big part of it then is kind of client selection, making sure that you are working with the right clients to begin with. Because if someone at the outset says, like, I can’t do that, then they’re not a good client for you to work with.
Elizabeth Yang: 22:01
Not necessarily. There are clients who don’t heed my advice and they say, no, you don’t know my X, they’re different. We need to fight it out. So if they need to get the fight out, they gotta.
John Corcoran: 22:12
Learn the lesson sometimes, right?
Elizabeth Yang: 22:13
Yeah, yeah. We still litigate for them.
John Corcoran: 22:15
Yeah. So you started this firm, it looks like in 2016. The pandemic of course hit in 2020. How was the shift from having a partner running a firm with a partner to running the firm with just you?
Elizabeth Yang: 22:33
It’s different. There are advantages and disadvantages. Advantages are you get more control. You get more flexibility. You don’t have to ask someone else for their opinion.
But on the other hand, the disadvantages are you’re responsible for everything, right? If you don’t bring in enough business, then you can’t pay the bills and your whole company can implode. So you don’t have anyone to rely on when you’re the one and only owner.
John Corcoran: 22:59
Yeah. So you end up actually in 2023 starting OptiNizers, which is. Well, I’ll let you describe what it is. But a remote staffing agency.
Elizabeth Yang: 23:10
Yeah. Yeah. It’s a remote talent business.
Elizabeth Yang: 23:13
We outsource Filipino talent. So all of our staff are from the Philippines. And they can work on anything ranging from administrative tasks such as scheduling or checking emails or making phone calls to something more specialized, like social media and marketing, you know, website design or even we’ve got like licensed lawyers in the Philippines doing paralegal work for law firms here, or licensed CPAs in the Philippines doing bookkeeping for companies in the US. So anything that can be done virtually and remotely can be done by our staff.
John Corcoran: 23:49
And I assume that that was something that you’d harnessed in your own law firm.
Elizabeth Yang: 23:55
Yes.
Elizabeth Yang: 23:56
We started using virtual assistants several years ago. I hired one person to help me basically be my personal assistant, scheduling calls, scheduling meetings with me. And then I realized, you know what? There’s actually a lot of talent out there. So we hired a paralegal to help with filling out forms and doing even legal research.
And then we hired a bookkeeper to help us send out invoices and do collections. So right now we have seven virtual assistants working in our law firm. And so when I met Andy through EO and he said that he had just started this new virtual assistant company and wanted to bring me on to do marketing with my big network. I was like, of course, I believe in this kind of company, and I believe that virtual assistants really can help companies and professionals here in the US. So I’d love to help spread the word.
John Corcoran: 24:51
What was it about that request from Andy that made you feel that, you know, that one plus one would equal three, that the partnership would be a good partnership and that you could bring something to the table and he could bring something to the table, and it would be a good pairing.
Elizabeth Yang: 25:09
Well, actually, it has to do with our third partner, Duke, who lives in Manila. He’s a Philippines member. So my family and I planned a vacation to the Philippines for New Years, like winter break about three years ago, and I had never been to the Philippines. I didn’t know how heavily they looked at the holidays, so we went there. I’m usually a very spontaneous person, so we didn’t make any dinner reservations, you know, or taxi ride reservations.
I was just going to go there and play it by ear. Once I got there, Andy’s like, did you make any reservations? It’s New Year’s Eve. I’m like, no, we’re just going to see what’s open. He’s like, there’s not going to be anything available.
Everything’s going to be booked. He’s like, I need to introduce you to Duke. And Duke ended up inviting us to his house for New Year’s Eve. I was a complete stranger. He had never met me before.
But it just goes to show the hospitality of the Filipinos. They took me into their house. We ended up. Or family and their family having New Year’s Eve dinner when we were supposed to leave Manila. There was a big problem with the air traffic control towers that shut down the entire airport, and we were stranded at the airport.
Duke comes back to the airport, picks us up. We ended up spending the night at his house, in his guest house, and he took us around town and was super hospitable, and we ended up becoming really good friends. I came back to the US and they said, hey, Duke and I both want you to join. And I was like, I would love to be partners with you guys. You guys are amazing.
John Corcoran: 26:52
Oh that’s cool. Before we wrap up, I want to ask about one other thing. So you like that I share an interest in local government involvement. And you were recently elected Mayor Pro Tem of your city, which is Monterey Park, California. And you also served in Parks and Rec, like the Amy Poehler kind of story, which I did as well.
And the design review board. Talk a little bit about what that has been like for you, especially with a background in law. I found that, you know, having a background in law can be really helpful in hashing out regulations and laws and things like that on a local level.
Elizabeth Yang: 27:32
Yeah, it’s been amazing. I’m very passionate about community service and volunteer work giving back to the community. So I’ve served on five different commissions in our city for the last 15 years, And folks have been asking me to run for public office for many years too. I’ve always said no in the past because my children were younger, but now that they’re both in high school, I need less of my time. I finally said yes.
This time around, I ran and I got elected, and it’s been 3 to 4 months since I’ve been in office. It’s been a really great experience. I’m learning so much about the city. My first week after getting sworn in, I had a three hour meeting with the city manager and the city attorney. They gave me two big binders with all the confidential cases, projects, even litigation that this is involved in.
And I was like, really grateful that I had a legal background because I was able to understand a lot of the legal terminology. I think someone who doesn’t have a legal background might have some trouble understanding the specificities of the ongoings in the city, but it’s very there’s a lot of overlap between the legal world, between city runs. And then I’m learning a lot more about local government. And I love learning. So it’s yeah, eye opening and great.
John Corcoran: 28:54
One more one more thing to balance. That’s super impressive how you can get all these things done. Elizabeth, this has been really interesting. Tell us where people can go to learn more about you and learn about OptiNizers and young law offices and everything else.
Elizabeth Yang: 29:07
Yang offices, the websites are just the name yanglawoffices.com or Instagram handle is also @yanglawoffices, OptiNizers same thing optinizers.com. So it’s a play on words between optimize and organize. So OptiNizers and the same thing with Instagram it’s at OptiNizers.
John Corcoran: 29:28
Cool. All right Elizabeth thanks so much.
Elizabeth Yang: 29:31
My pleasure.
Outro: 29:35
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