I often get asked these questions from young people who are considering going to law school: “Do you use your law degree in what you do? Has it helpe… - Andrew Yang

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I often get asked these questions from young people who are considering going to law school: “Do you use your law degree in what you do? Has it helped you?” These are difficult questions to answer succinctly. It’s impossible for me to say that it doesn’t play into my day-to-day activities because law school and briefly practicing law rewired my brain. I’m more structured and detail-oriented than I would have been. Having gone to law school years ago still impacts my job performance every day. Plus, people tended to accord me some professional respect in my twenties in part because I had a high-value graduate degree. It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the impact it’s had. On the other hand, it’s not as if I’m editing contracts or figuring out if something is legal on a regular basis. If I were to come across a genuine legal issue I’d call a lawyer who specializes in that sort of thing or look it up online like anyone else. Legal training (and the subsequent indebtedness) would not be my first suggestion to a young person looking to do something enterprising.* I felt I had to unlearn a lot as I embarked down a very different road.