Ursula Weigold: Accidentally Finding What You Love to Do DOWNLOAD PDF

By Desmund Wu

Ursula Weigold has always been skeptical about people who have wanted to know about her five- or ten-year plan. So many of the best things that have happened in her life, from living in Yemen, to her first job out of law school, to teaching legal writing, to creating a legal writing program from the ground up, weren’t carefully planned out. Instead, she simply accidentally happened upon many of them and made choices that led to new adventures and jobs that she has loved.

Ursula was born near Vancouver, Canada, to parents who immigrated from Germany. Growing up, she moved every few years because of her father’s work for an American construction company. She went to different schools every couple of years, and lived in places like Seattle, New Orleans, and Lodi, California. “We didn’t have the conventional white-picket fence, stay-in-one-place childhood, but I loved travelling and still do,” Ursula said.

Her father died when she was relatively young, and after his death, her mother moved the family to Germany. They moved in June, and Ursula started school in Germany soon after, armed with only two months’ worth of German language ability. Ursula laughs remembering what it was like in Germany as a kid. “I hated it at the time. I was starting my teenage years, with the usual fights with my mother and rebellion, regularly telling her that she’d ruined my life. But now I’m so immensely grateful that I had that experience. I learned German pretty well and even decades later, I can still understand just about any German conversation.”

Beyond going to school in a new place, Ursula also suddenly found herself connected to an extended family. Up until that point, she had her parents and sisters, but she didn’t have many other close, conventional connections because of the family’s frequent moves. In Germany, she suddenly found her-self connected to grandparents, cousins, and other family who had lived in the area for centuries.

Her mother’s family had been dairy farmers in South-ern Germany, and so late one summer, her mother decided that Ursula and her sisters should experience life on the land. They spent a week helping dig potatoes on a relative’s farm. “For a 12-year-old, the idea of getting your hands deep in the dirt and deal-ng with earthworms and potatoes wasn’t exactly appealing, but it was a good experience to feel how hard people have to work to get by.” Thinking back on her childhood in Germany, she appreciates being immersed in a different culture with its focus on rules, order, directness, and clear expectations.

Ursula returned to the United States for high school. “My Mom was very adventurous. She decided we were going to move to Houston just because it sounded like an interesting city.” Like many other first-generation students, she never planned to go to college since she didn’t think her family could afford it. That changed when a high school counselor explained financial aid programs. “It was mind-boggling to me that I could get not only loans, but also grants to go to school. It was amazing that strangers were helping to pay for me to go to school!”

Ursula enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. She picked it mostly because many of her friends were going there, and she ended up loving college. It was the first time she’d been away from home, and she loved the smaller sense of community and college life in Austin versus the huge, spread out hustle and bustle of Houston. “With no clear career plan, I started col-lege as a Drama major, and my mom thought I was stark raving crazy.” She eventually majored in History and Journal-ism, in part because she had worked on her high school newspaper in Houston. In the summers, she worked as an orientation advisor at the University’s week-long orientation, welcoming new students to the school and helping them to feel unintimidated and like they belonged.

She stayed at UT Austin for law school. At the end of her 1L year, her longtime boy-friend unexpectedly proposed, and she married him and moved to Sana’a, Yemen, where he was posted as a foreign ser-vice officer. Before she left, she went through intensive preparation at the State Department, learning about the culture, history, language, and customs of Yemen. Moving there opened her eyes to a whole new part of the world. “In Yemen, foreign women were considered ‘honorary’ men, so we could drive, which you couldn’t do in other places even if you were attached to an embassy. People would look at you curiously as a foreigner walking around town, but there weren’t many restrictions.”

At that time, Yemen was relatively stable, with no civil war or the scale of humanitarian issues the country faces today. She remembers meeting friendly and welcoming people, drinking a lot of tea, and travelling across the country. While one or two of the trips were with her then-husband or embassy officers to do outreach to important tribal leaders, most of the trips were about exploring the varied landscapes of Yemen, from the archaeological sites in the mountain regions along hair-raising roads and breathtaking landscapes, to Marib, the alleged city ruled by the Queen of Sheba in the desert of the Empty Quarter, to Hodeiyah, a port on the Red Sea.

After the tour in Yemen ended, she finished law school and stumbled into the perfect job from an ad on a Career Services bulletin board. That job was working as a judicial clerk for Chief Justice Frank Evans at the Texas Court of Appeals. “We’re often shaped by those who we work with as we begin our legal careers, and I consider myself incredibly lucky because he was my first boss. He fit my idealized image of what a compassionate, smart, objective jurist should be.” He helped her and the other clerks become self-sufficient by giving supportive critiques, praising their accomplishments, and steering them in the right direction without being heavy-handed or micromanaging.

A lot of that first year of clerkship was about getting up to speed about how the judicial system worked and how to research and write a bench memo. “Legal writing courses were nascent at that time, so my own Legal Research and Writing class was a one-credit course in the spring semester taught by a 3L. I was woefully unprepared for any practical job, but that was true of most new law graduates at the time. The senior staff attorneys did a boot camp for the new clerks about research and writing.” She learned to read the lawyers’ briefs critically, then check the record and independently research the law for the justices.

At the end of her clerkship, a staff attorney position opened, and she transitioned to working at the court in a different capacity. She loved not only working behind the scenes of the judicial system, but also seeing examples of the best and the worst of lawyering firsthand. Her time there taught her the value of objectively evaluating the facts of a case, critically analyzing the law, and not taking for granted that lawyers presented an accurate picture of either. It also turned out to be great preparation for teaching legal research, analysis, and writing.

Just as she stumbled into the clerkship she loved from an ad on a bulletin board, she stumbled into teaching accidentally as well. A former staff attorney at the court had started teaching legal research and writing and told Ursula that another legal writing professor had left mid-semester, leaving the students furious and the law school scrambling to find a replacement. With permission from the court, Ursula stepped in and started teaching at South Texas College of Law in early October. “In my first class, I told the students, ‘I don’t know how much you have or haven’t covered, so I’m going to do an intensive review of what I think you’ve covered,’ and students loved that. There might have been only one or two legal writing texts at the time. I quickly read through them and was reassured by the many parallels to the skills and knowledge I used in my ‘day job.’” The next year, a full-time teaching job opened up, and she got the position.

Just as she loved working on the court—something she never planned—Ursula dis-covered that she also loved teaching. “The three main areas that we teach – analysis, research strategy, and effective writing – are so complex that there’s always something new to learn, and always new ways to help novices move towards mastery.” She also loves helping students make the transition to an unfamiliar law school environment and a new kind of writing. “As every law teacher knows, there’s a lot of ambiguity in law and ‘it depends’ is often the correct answer. So, you tell that to students up-front and tell them you’ll do your best to get them up to speed, without pretending that you know all the answers. Just as lawyers don’t know all the answers.” At South Texas, she was able to combine her love of travelling with teaching in summer abroad programs in Malta, Istanbul, and Durham, England.