Below is an excerpt from Andrew Yang‘s new book, Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America, which comes out in February 2014. Andrew was named Managing Director of Manhattan GMAT in 2006, Chief Executive Officer in 2007, and President in 2010. He left Manhattan GMAT in 2010 to start Venture for America, where he now serves as Founder and CEO. 

The Prestige Pathways.  

Let’s imagine a very large company. It is a leader in its industry and much admired by its peers. It invests a tremendous amount of money—literally billions of dollars a year—in identifying, screening, and training its many employees. Those employees who are considered to have high potential are sent to special training programs at substantial additional cost. Happily, these top training programs are considered to be among the best in the world. After these employees complete their training, the company encourages them to choose for themselves the division in which they’d like to work. Employee preferences are deemed to be the most efficient way of deciding who works where.

This seems like a good system, and it works well for a long time. However, perhaps predictably, many of its most highly rated employees eventually become drawn to the finance and legal divisions because these divisions have very effective recruitment arms, are more visible, pay better, and are thought of as providing a more intellectual level of work.  Over time, proportionally fewer of the top recruits go toward the management of the company or the company’s operations.  The company’s basic training division is considered a backwater, with low pay and low recognition. And only a relative handful of employees go toward research and development or the launching of any new products.

Take a second to think about the company described above. What do you think will happen to this company as time passes? And if you think that it’s not set on a path to success, what would you do to fix it? This company reflects, in essence, the economy of the United States of America.

If you are a smart college student and you want to become a lawyer and go to law school, what you must do has been well established. You must go to a good school, get good grades (already accomplished, for many), and take the LSAT (a four-hour skill test). There is no anxiety in divining the requirements, as they are clearly spelled out. Most undergrads, even those with little interest in law school, know what it takes to get in. The path location costs are low.

The same is true if you want to become a doctor. Becoming a doctor is hard, right? Sort of. It is arduous and time-consuming, but it is not hard if you have certain academic abilities. You must take a battery of college courses (organic chemistry being the most infamous and rigorous of them) and do well, study for the MCAT (an eight-hour exam), and spend a summer or even a year caddying for a researcher, doctor, or hospital. These are time-consuming hoop-jumping tasks, to be sure, but anyone with a very high level of academic aptitude can complete them.

If you attend an Ivy League university or similar national institution, legions of suit-wearing representatives from the big-name investment banks and consulting firms will show up at your campus and conduct first-round interviews to fill their ranks each year, even in a down period (as with the recent years following the financial crisis). They will spend millions of dollars enlisting interns and educating the market annually. Most freshmen have no idea what management consulting is, yet seniors can rattle off the distinctions of different firms with little difficulty. All undergraduates have friends in the classes above them who have gone through this process and gained analyst or associate positions at major investment banks and consulting firms.
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Below is an excerpt from Andrew Yang‘s new book, Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America, which comes out in February 2014. Andrew was named Managing Director of Manhattan GMAT in 2006, Chief Executive Officer in 2007, and President in 2010. He left Manhattan GMAT in 2010 to start Venture for America, where he now serves as Founder and CEO. 

Smart People Should Build Things. 

I believe there’s a basic solution to our country’s economic and social problems. We need to get our smart people building things (again). They’re not really doing it right now. They’d like to. But they’re being led down certain paths during and after college and told not to worry, they can figure it out later.

Take me, for instance. I wasn’t very enterprising when I graduated from Brown in 1996. I had a general desire to be smart, accomplished, and successful—whatever that meant. So I went to law school and became a corporate attorney in New York. I figured out I was in the wrong place after a number of months working at the law firm. I left in less than a year and cofounded a dot-com company, Stargiving, which helped raise money for celebrity-affiliated nonprofits. It was extraordinarily difficult. My company failed spectacularly, but I recovered. I went to work for a mobile software company, Crisp Wireless, and then a health care software company, MMF Systems, over the next five years, eventually becoming the CEO of a test-prep company, Manhattan GMAT, in 2006.

I spent five years running Manhattan GMAT, helping young people get into business school. I taught our corporate classes of investment banking analysts and consultants at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Company, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Deloitte, as well as hundreds of individual students over the years. Some were exactly where they wanted to be. But there seemed to be just as many top-notch young people who wondered why they didn’t like their jobs more. They sought a higher sense of engagement with their work and their careers. Sometimes they would put words to what they were looking for; they’d say they wanted “something entrepreneurial” or “to be really excited about something.”
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This past week, some really interesting articles about the legal profession, its present and its future, made their way to me. I thought I’d share them here on the blog, since they will also probably interest all you future lawyers! Here they are, in no particular order:

Will computers replace humans as lawyers?

(And will it be this cryptic start-up?  More on it here)

How to fix the justice gap: A controversial suggestion

And more on access to justice:

A futuristic infographic on what’s to come…by a paralegal:

Good news! Lawyers can still act human, and even be fun ones:

A lawyer dad applauds a son’s decision not to become one, too.

Last weekend I got to attend Columbia University’s mock trial tournament sponsored by Manhattan LSAT and had the privilege of watching some very talented students from colleges up and down the east coast flash their argumentation skills. At one point, I found myself talking to a senior who said that despite his love of mock trial, he didn’t want to go to law school.

“I’d much rather take the GMAT than the LSAT,” he said. “I opened an LSAT book and saw logic games and was like, ‘no thanks!’”

My immediate reactions:

“But you are missing out on something great for a bad reason!”
“If you knew the test, you’d feel differently.”
“You didn’t even give it a chance!”

In other words, I responded like the LSAT was my boyfriend, first novel, or mom.

What’s so lovable about the LSAT?

I’ve written on how it makes you smarter. But that was an appeal to research showing what I already believed to be true, because the LSAT had already made me smarter.

In high school and college, I got by on my strengths, which were not, though I didn’t realize it at the time, anything resembling logical thinking. I was an insightful thinker and could write in a way that flowed, and these were enough to push me over the threshold for most teachers and professors. I graduated with high GPAs.

When I first opened a book of practice LSATs, I was a college junior doing so out of curiosity. It wasn’t an intentional move to initiate a study plan–I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to law school. Much like the fellow I mentioned above, I just wanted to see what this LSAT thing was all about. I took a few questions–maybe a whole logical reasoning section, maybe just a few pages, I can’t remember. What I do remember is that I missed the vast majority of them. I answered 2-3 right and at least 10-12 wrong. I recall seeing X’s all over the dingy pages of the yellowing, used practice book I’d bought, and closing it, thinking, “From now on, I have to hide the fact that I’m just not good at logic.” I was convinced I wasn’t a logical thinker, and that any day, someone would discover it about me.

Two years later, I was sure I did want to apply to law school, and I went about approaching the LSAT yet again, intimidated tremendously by my earlier, brief encounter with it. I enrolled in a course, did all my homework, didn’t miss a class or a diagnostic test, and began the slow, arduous process of improving my study skills: I turned off the music. I put in ear plugs. I made myself focus for thirty-minute increments without getting up for a snack or to put some wacky clip in my hair. And over the weeks then months, I watched my score go up. As it did, I became aware that I was learning a certain mode of thinking, and so my confidence went up, as well. I started to believe in myself intellectually in a way I hadn’t before. By the time I actually took the text over six months after I’d begun studying, I had gone from answering only 13 questions (4-5 of which I got wrong) on a timed logic games section–that is, leaving the other 10-11 blank–to completing a perfect logic games section.
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Happy Halloween everyone! We hope you’re not too wrapped up in the LSAT prep work to dress up and celebrate. We posted these awesome legal-themed costume ideas last year and we thought they were so great that we needed to do a repost this year–we’ve even added a few new ones. The best part is that most are very easy to create, and, well, since today is Halloween you don’t have too much time to waste!

1. Colonial Lawyer:  Take the traditional route and pop on a black robe and white collar and wig.
2. My Cousin Vinny: Plenty of options for this one. You could go with the all black ensemble (black pants, leather jacket, and silver belt and chain) or you could spice it up with a brown/orange suit, complete with a matching bowtie, white button-down, and heavy New York accent.
3. A Lawsuit: Wear a suit and attach legal documents all over it (Amendments of the Constitution, the UCC, Restatement of Torts) .
4. The Second Amendment: Wear a sleeveless shirt.
5. The Socratic Method: Get a white sheet from the linen closet and style a Greek toga. Sling a colored sash around your shoulder with the word “method” written across it.
6. “A Salt” with a Deadly Weapon– Dress in all white with a grey hat. Poke a few holes in the top of the hat to mimic a salt shaker. Carry around a toy gun/sword/knife or water gun of some sort. You can even get a pal to be a bloody pepper shaker.
7. Judge: A white, curly wig, pair of glasses, white turtleneck, and a black robe should do the trick. Add some pizzazz by adopting a New York accent and calling yourself Judy.
8. Elle Woods: Bring out anything and everything pink. Pink dress, skirt, shirt, heels, and hat. If you’re not a natural blonde, grab a wig, as this is a pretty essential part of the costume. Don’t forget to pick up a Chihuahua and dress him in a matching pink outfit.
9. The Lazy Lawyer: For those who want something more subtle or are just too lazy to put a complete costume together, throw on the shirt pictured above from Zazzle.com.
10. Yourself: If you don’t fancy the whole costume idea, just go as the studious LSAT student that you are. Accessorize with you’re pencils, stopwatch, and Manhattan LSAT Strategy guides.

Already have your costume picked out and ready to go? We’d love to hear what you’re going as! Leave a comment below or shoot us a tweet @manhattanLSAT.

Music can do a lot for us, but the word is still out on whether it can enhance our ability to stay focused and sharpen our memories during long study sessions. On the one hand, we have a report from the University of Toronto suggesting that fast and loud background music can hinder our performance on reading comprehension. On the other, there’s the recent research from the digital music service, Spotify, and Clinical Psychologist Dr. Emma Gray, which proclaims that pop hits from artists like Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry, and Miley Cyrus can actually enhance our cognitive abilities.

“Music has a positive effect on the mind, and listening to the right type of music can actually improve studying and learning,” says Dr. Gray. She even suggests that students who listen to music while studying can perform better than those who do not.

We also cannot leave out the so-called “Mozart Effect,” which alleges that listening to classical music provides short-term enhancement of mental tasks, like memorization. We’ve heard students swear by this tactic, while others say that silence is golden.
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The LSAT can lead to a lucrative career in law, or a Supreme Court clerkship. Some lawyers fight for the rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees; others practice space law.

In my case, it led to Brooklyn small claims court. A year after leaving Yale Law School and passing the New York Bar, I found myself in downtown Brooklyn with a pile of tabbed evidence (exhibits A-H) in my lap, seething at the petite woman in pink flats seated across from me, the owner of my local UPS store just north of Prospect Park, as she crossed her arms and yelled, “YOU SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT INSURANCE!”

She was right. I should have, and I didn’t. But I had just sued her on behalf of myself.

It began, the way too many things do, with an overpriced pair of shoes. They were worse than overpriced; they were exorbitantly expensive, the most expensive pair of … the most expensive anything fashion-related I’d ever purchased by eight hundred percent. (For you fellow math-challenged, that means if the most I’d ever spent on a pair of shoes had been twenty dollars, they’d be $160 … and that’s not it.)

Thing is, I was working at a “big law firm” when I bought them and, in my abject misery, constantly seeking out means of instant gratification and temporary solace: McDonalds french fries for lunch (large, naturally); a fourth cup of coffee; that dress in the window I don’t even like that much but maybe it’ll look almost good with a belt.

During my lunch break, which wasn’t so much a “break” as fifteen minutes I could sneak away as a bottom-level associate, I walked over to Madison Avenue and bought the $hoes to feel better. And I did for about ten minutes.

When I quit my law job two months later to write (and actually began to feel better), I could not only no longer afford such extravagances, I could no longer afford to live with the previous ones, including the $hoes (although I had never actually been able to bring myself to wear them, anyway). I cashed out part of my IRA, moved to Brooklyn and put the the $hoes on eBay, where they sold quickly. I dropped them off at my local UPS store and, a week later, received an email in all caps from Yvonne, the buyer, in San Diego: WHERE R SHOES EVENT IS 2NITE!!!!!

A dozen calls and emails to the UPS branch, and I still didn’t have any answers. I googled the branch and found similar complaints of “lost,” high-value items that were never recovered. I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau (where the store, for the record, had an F rating). The store responded in a terse letter that it was my fault for not buying additional insurance. It didn’t mention anything about where the shoes might be now.

When I called the national UPS customer service line, the CS representative I spoke to told me she couldn’t help.

“You’ll need to take it up with your local branch,” she said.

I was done: done with working things the soft way, and done with saying “branch.” Full of rage and self-righteousness, and $300 poorer after eBay made me pay back Yvonne, I googled “Brooklyn small claims” and found my way to Turbocourt, the judicial twin of Turbotax, which, as you can infer, files your lawsuits for a fee. Instantly, I got my trial date: September 18th, 2012.

I had to teach a class that night.

I called the court.

“I have to work the night of my hearing,” I told the clerk, “so could we move up the date?” She told me that I’d have to send a letter to the judge, who would open it on my court date, in my absence, and decide whether or not to give me an extension. Best case scenario, the new date would be several months later.

No. This was a matter of justice, and as I’d heard too many times in law school, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” I would find a substitute teacher, and on September 18th, I would be there, guns blazing.

Over the next four months, I spent around twenty hours preparing for my hearing, at which I assumed UPS would not show. I hoped to get a winning judgment by default (which can happen when a defendant just doesn’t show up). I rehearsed my arguments, printed and sorted evidence at Kinkos while the clock charged my Visa, and invited a friend along for moral support, who brought her microphone to record (how could we not document such an exciting event?). By the time I arrived at small claims, I had spent or foregone (having gotten a sub for my class) well over the original value of the shoes–not even the resale price. Theoriginal price.

Small claims court is the little league of court. Few people have lawyers. You can only sue for $5,000 or less.

After an hour in a tense and crowded room, my case is finally called–case 87 of the 95 on the calendar that night.

“Mary Adkins!”

“Here.”

“UPS!”

“Here,” a voice chimes from the back. I turn to spot a small, angry-looking woman in a hot pink shirt and dark, creased jeans standing in the corner, staring right back at me.

Our case is sent to room 509, several flights up, and we end up in the same elevator. After nearly half a year of cultivating anger at UPS, the abstract merchant who won’t return my calls, it’s strange now to face this woman who (a) actually came, and (b) doesn’t look evil or abstract, at all. She just looks annoyed.

When we arrive on the fifth floor, I introduce myself. Her name is Camille. She’s owned the store with her brother for seven years.

Ultimately, we end up in front of an arbitrator. We each tell our version of the story. Hers is defensive, and I find myself believing it: she wasn’t there the day I shipped the shoes, and she trusts her employees. When the arbitrator raises her eyebrows in a way that signals, to both of us I think, that the store is nonetheless responsible for the shoes, Camille caves. She offers to pay me $316–the sale price, plus what I’d paid for shipping. I accept her offer because it feels like this is where this ends, and because it seems, now that I’ve heard her version, fair or at least fair-ish … never mind that what I’m agreeing to is less than what I have spent or forfeited just working on the case, alone.

As the arbitrator drafts the agreement, Camille and I chat. She is talkative about the challenges of running a small shipping franchise. People are always claiming that expensive items have been lost when she has no way of verifying whether or not what they’re saying is true. She’s sick of it, and this case has been the tipping point.

Because of me, she tells me–not kindly–she’s had to institute a new policy to track packages from the moment they are dropped off through each stage of handling. Her employees, and the employees of the companies she works with, are irritated by the new policy; they have to record and tick off every phase of transfer, and it substantially slows down the process. But she doesn’t care. The policy’s purpose is to spare her from having to spend evenings like this and cutting checks to people like me.

As we shake hands and part ways, I realize something. If Camille had just paid up but walked away without having said anything more, I’m pretty sure I would have wound up with the same empty feeling I’d had after the fleeting pleasure of buying the shoes had passed: the understanding that nothing was different. The delight at having “won” or prevailed eventually would have left me in the same place I was before the whole thing ever took place; instant gratification dissipates rapidly into The Default, As Usual.

But that isn’t what happened. Because something lasting came out of this–a policy change–I left small claims feeling better than I did coming in, and that feeling has endured; it’s with me months later.

Small claims is no space law. But my local UPS is a more reliable institution now. Begrudgingly, and via collective hostility, it operates in what I believe is a superior way. And that feels good.

In my case, the LSAT didn’t lead to a headline-worthy legal career. But it did lead to one headline that makes me a little proud, small as that may be.

People are often surprised to learn certain things about the Law School Admissions Test, in particular that a substantial portion of its content appears irrelevant to “being a lawyer.” A typical LSAT “game” reads something like, “If Frank lets go of his balloon first and Anna lets go of her balloon last, how many different combinations of kids could lose balloons in between?” Imagine sudoku but with words. This, and yet law schools give applicants’ LSAT scores tremendous weight in making their admissions decisions.

But they haven’t always. The test itself is only 65 years old, and the history of the LSATprovides some insight into why, exactly, it can seem to have so little to do with the field of law.

Prior to the LSAT, there wasn’t one admissions test that all law schools used–there were a couple of well-known ones, but their use wasn’t universal. In 1945 the admissions director at Columbia Law School, unsatisfied with the tests currently available, wrote to the President of the College Entrance Examination Board that he wanted to discuss the creation of a new one. When they finally met two years later, they envisioned a test intended to correlate with first year grades “on the assumption that first-year performance is highly correlated with later success in law school and in legal practice.” The key was law school performance, not bar exam passage since, they noted at the meeting, “everybody passes [bar exams] sooner or later” (quote pulled from the same article linked to above). With this goal in mind, they invited Harvard and Yale to sign on to the plan, which they did, followed by other schools.

The LSAT was never intended to measure aptitude for the practice of law; it was designed to measure potential success as a law student based on the belief that LSAT performance would correlate with law school performance, and that law school performance would correlate with one’s professional success thereafter.

So how have all these expected correlations played out?

A 2011 report by the Law School Admissions Council (which administers the LSAT) claims that the LSAT is a better predictor of law school performance than undergraduate GPA, and that GPA and LSAT score combined is a better predictor than either one, alone, concluding that “these results, combined with similar results from previous studies, support the validity of the LSAT for use in the law school admission process.” I know: shocking that an LSAC study would affirm LSAC’s continuing usefulness. But there is also, interestingly, some evidence that preparing for the test itself alters your brain–that learning LSAT-relevant reasoning can actually make you smarter. Silvia Bunge, associate professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute says:

“A lot of people still believe that you are either smart or you are not, and sure, you can practice for a test, but you are not fundamentally changing your brain … Our research provides a more positive message. How you perform on one of these tests is not necessarily predictive of your future success, it merely reflects your prior history of cognitive engagement, and potentially how prepared you are at this time to enter a graduate program or a law school, as opposed to how prepared you could ever be.”

But the process of studying for the text had visible effects on brain connectivity:

The structural changes were revealed by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scans of the brains of 24 college students or recent graduates before and after 100 hours of LSAT training over a three-month period. When compared with brain scans of a matched control group of 23 young adults, the trained students developed increased connectivity between the frontal lobes of the brain, and between frontal and parietal lobes.

If this is true, perhaps what’s ultimately so useful about the LSAT isn’t how well it’s correlated with first-year grades, or how well it predicts overall success, but how preparing for it actually makes people better at reasoning. That may make them better at the LSAT sure, but ultimately it’s because they’ve been made better thinkers, which we can infer without getting too crazy likely means better law students and lawyers. That would make the LSAT, rather than just a weeding out tool or a litmus test, a kind of phase of legal training, itself.

As for whether doing well in law school makes you a better lawyer, well, a 2010 studydoes suggest that it’s a good predictor of your career: “the consistent theme we find throughout this analysis is that performance in law school–as measured by law school grades–is the most important predictor of career success. It is decisively more important than law school ‘eliteness.’” This should dispel some worry that what school you get into matters more than how you do once you get there (a commonly held viewamong law school applicants).

So if the LSAT is a reasonably reliable predictor of law school performance, and if law school performance is a reliable predictor of career success, can we say that the LSAT can predict if you’re going to be a good lawyer? I’ll leave that one for you to reason out, for your own sake.

“In prison, time crawls on hands and knees in what feels like a dead world.” –Fernando Bermudez

In 1992, Fernando Bermudez was convicted of murder. He spent 18 years in prison before his conviction was overturned in 2009 by State Supreme Court Justice John Cataldo on the grounds that he’d “demonstrated his actual innocence.” Judge Cataldo continued, “This court wishes to express its profound regret over the past 18 years. I hope for you a better future.”

As a member of the team that produces Life of the Law‘s podcast and blog, I have had the privilege of hearing Fernando’s story firsthand. On May 3, at WNYC’s The Greene Space, you’re invited to hear it, too (for free!).

LIVE LAW: Stories from the Legal Edge is produced by Life of the Law and will feature true stories told live by Fernando and others, including The Lady Aye, a sword swallower (for real); Steve Zimmer, former kid; Gretchen Greene, a lawyer-turned sculptor; and Yannick Morgan, a semi-narcoleptic attorney. Drinks will be sold to buy and to drink.

I am posting about it here not just because I’m directing the show, but because I am so excited about it and know that many of you might be interested in coming for the same reasons you’re interested in law. I hope if you do, you’ll introduced yourself (or say hello). Seats are free but going quickly; make a reservation here. I hope to see you there!

Where:
The Greene Space
44 Charlton Street (on the corner of Varick)
New York, NY 10013

When:
May 31, 2013

7pm-8:15pm (doors open at 6:30)
Free admission
Beer, wine and light refreshments for sale