John Ursu, ’02, has always been a storyteller.
It started when he was a kid, and he and his sister would perform puppet shows. His parents recalled that squeals of laughter were all they could hear. “They could not discern any of the actual words in the story because we were just cracking each other up so much. That’s sort of my foundational moment,” he said.
Ursu’s career path took him from the theater to the law, but all along this path, he has noticed how storytelling helps people connect with each other, as well as how people use stories to make sense of things.
Now, Ursu incorporates storytelling into his work as a partner at Faegre Drinker in Minneapolis, where he leads large commercial disputes, and into his teaching at the University of Minnesota Law School.
A path toward writing
After college, Ursu pursued theater, and he directed plays for several years. Directing always involved “working through really complicated texts and trying to find a way to make a story,” he said.
Next, he set his sights on becoming a writer. But, while at a writers’ conference in Vermont, it occurred to him that he didn’t have anything to say. So he changed course and went to law school. That had been his sister’s dream, but when she became ill and couldn’t pursue it, he did instead. (They swapped dreams: Instead of becoming a lawyer, she became a successful novelist.)
At Michigan Law, Ursu dove into a different kind of writing: He wrote on to the Michigan Law Review and became managing editor. He also participated in the Henry M. Campbell Moot Court Competition, where he realized that his storytelling experience was useful. “We ultimately distilled down the arguments to motive versus message,” said Ursu, who won the 2002 competition with his partner, Catherine M.A. Carroll, ’02.
Ursu not only practiced his storytelling skills but also built his confidence to step up and use them in law school. His interactions with other students prepared him to be a lawyer, he said. “My peers were so smart, so interesting, and so open to someone like me. That gave me a lot of confidence going out into the world that I could do it.”
He also drew storytelling inspiration from a unique classroom experience: Ursu said that Professor Bill Miller’s class on Icelandic blood feuds stuck with him after law school because of the emotions Miller taught—like disgust and courage—and because he learned the ways people react to disputes.
After law school, Ursu clerked for two years for a federal district court judge. “I loved clerking because I got to be a writer. And that was the beginning of trying to piece things together and come up with compelling narratives that made intuitive sense,” he said.
A failure and a turning point
Once Ursu started practicing law, he realized he’d gotten away from what had made him good at storytelling. At an early mock trial, he said, “I utterly failed. And I realized that I had lost whatever the gifts were that brought me so much joy before law school.”
Shortly afterward, he visited his high school to judge a mock trial. “I was like, holy smokes, these high school students are better than most of the lawyers that I know,” even though they’d had mere hours of training, not years, he said.
The difference? Ursu’s law school and early-career training had taught him to be a lawyer—but had also gotten in the way of connecting with people in meaningful ways.
Much of law school, taking the bar, and legal research requires your analytical brain, “and you may need that to be a good and competent lawyer,” he said. “The challenge is that all the decisional science says that that’s not how people decide. People are not deciding with the analytical part of their brain. They’re deciding with their viscera. One of the best trial lawyers that I know says he tries to speak to the stomach of the jury, not to the head.”
To speak to the stomach, Ursu has learned to combine his artistic storytelling skills with his analytical skills, and he has taught other lawyers and law students how to do so, too.
Juries and stories
Ursu started working closely with jury consultants. As social psychologists, they understand how people make decisions, he said.
He started to incorporate storytelling into his work more. He pointed to the play “Peter Pan” for example: At the end, the audience is asked to applaud and told that if they don’t, Tinkerbell will die, he explained. “The audience erupts and then Tinkerbell comes back to life, and that’s one of the few moments in a play where the audience actually gets to do something.”
Similarly, jurors and judges can be empowered to do something—to be the hero of the story and right a wrong or provide justice, Ursu said. “That’s the core work of storytelling, and that’s where it really took off for me.”
At the University of Minnesota Law School, Ursu has taught depositions, and now he coaches mock trial. “We work on closing arguments but also how to tell stories with your staging in the courtroom, and the way that you use your voice and your body, and how to tell coherent stories that motivate action,” he said.
This approach helps appeal to the good in people, Ursu said. “Fairytales all have morals to them in some way. Even with sophisticated novels, a lot of it is about the way that our values engage with the world as it is,” he said.
Most stories reach a point when someone faces adversity or conflict and needs to make a choice, Ursu said. “If you look at what separates Shakespeare’s villains from the heroes, it’s what they deploy in those moments. Do they deploy the finest human virtues, like forgiveness, love, duty, and selflessness, or darker things like ambition, greed, and hatred?”
That’s a choice that we all get to make, he said.
And this is what happened to Ursu himself, he said. “I went out and had a conflict in the world, in the sense that I was no longer my full self in the practice. And once I failed, I had a choice, and I was able to bring all of me to the practice.”