Elizabeth Yang

Entrepreneur, Lawyer, Public servant

Elizabeth Yang (楊安立) is an attorney, entrepreneur, and elected official whose career spans law, aerospace engineering, and community leadership. A California native raised in the San Gabriel Valley, she graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at just 19—completing the program in two and a half years. She began her career as an engineer, contributing to high-stakes projects at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Raytheon, including the Mars Exploration Rover and B2 Bomber radar systems. While working full-time in aerospace, she earned her JD/MBA from the University of La Verne. A personally challenging four-year divorce reshaped her path and led her into California family law, where she is now recognized for a compassionate, strategic approach to helping families through divorce, custody disputes, and mediation. She is the founder and CEO of Yang Law Offices, with offices across Southern California. A serial entrepreneur, Elizabeth also founded Optinizers, a remote talent agency, and previously built the Magical Playground retail chain. She is the author of six books, including Stress-Free Divorce, Asian Women Who Boss Up, and The Big Secret (with Jack Canfield), and a vocal advocate for "Social Marriage," a civil-contract alternative to traditional legal marriage. In 2024 she was elected to the Monterey Park City Council and currently serves as Mayor. Her honors include Top 40 Under 40 by the National Trial Lawyers Association and Super Lawyer by Thomson Reuters. She lives in Monterey Park with her husband and two children.

I'm passionate about helping people find the gift inside their hardest moments. As a family law attorney, I sit with people on the worst days of their lives—and I've been the client in that chair too, staring down a divorce bill wondering how it was even possible. I know how it feels when everything falls apart. What I care about most is helping people stop pouring their energy into holding a broken thing together and start using it to build something better: a healthier co-parenting relationship, a new business, a stronger version of themselves. I'm also passionate about mental health in the Asian American community—after the 2023 Monterey Park shooting, my city helped create Asian Minds Matter to turn that tragedy into awareness and support. Adversity, met with the right perspective, is where leadership is born.

Everything crumbles eventually—a marriage, a career, a business, a life we thought was permanent. When it does, the crumble brings grief, anger, and loss, but it also brings something unexpected: a sudden, sharp clarity. A burst of energy and focus. Most of us spend that energy trying to hold the old version together. That's the mistake. The same energy can be used to build something new instead. I learned this the hard way—through a four-year divorce that cost half a million dollars in legal fees and nearly broke me, until a friend's question reframed everything: "What if this wasn't the end? What if it was a gift?" That single shift turned a war with my ex into a respectful co-parenting relationship we still have today. Years later, when a business partnership fell apart, I didn't fight. I built. We see this everywhere: families who turn unimaginable loss into movements, foundations, even new laws. The crumble is inevitable. The real question isn't "Why did this happen to me?" It's "What can I build from this?"

I gave a TEDx talk called "The Gift of the Crumble" because I've lived both sides of falling apart—as the attorney giving advice, and as the client whose own life fell apart. A four-year divorce, half a million dollars in legal fees, and later a business breakup taught me something I now build my work and my life around: when everything falls apart, you can either spend your energy holding the old version together, or you can use it to build something new. That's the gift of the crumble. I wanted to bring this idea to the TEDx stage because almost everyone goes through some version of it—and almost no one is told there's a gift hidden inside. We're taught to fight the crumble, to grieve it, to survive it. We're rarely taught to learn from it. My hope is that the next time someone's life starts to fall apart, they pause long enough to ask a different question—not "Why did this happen to me?" but "What can I build from this?"—and find, like I did, that the crumble wasn't the end. It was the beginning.

Rocket science—literally. Before the courtroom and City Hall, I was an electrical engineer who finished UC Berkeley at 19 and worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Raytheon on the Mars Exploration Rover and B2 Bomber radar systems. People meet me as a family law attorney or as a mayor and have no idea I once spent my days on spacecraft and defense systems. That engineer's instinct—break the problem down, find the elegant solution—is exactly how I learned to rebuild a life when it crumbled.