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Mock Trial VS Moot Court: Which has more benefits for the future lawyer?

-- By GodardSolomon - 12 Mar 2022

Introduction

I will be writing my paper about my experiences in both Mock Trial and Moot Court and what I believe to be the advantages and drawbacks of both, mainly in relation to law school and our future careers as lawyers. I would like to offer a disclaimer that I will mainly focus on the impact this has on those who pursue litigation rather than transactional work, although there is probably overlap in utility of the skills to be gained.

Overview and Experience

Mock Trial

I first started Mock Trial in my sophomore year of high school. I went to a magnet school and was in the Legal Academy which had Mock Trial as an available extra-curricular. I joined and took on the role of an attorney. For better context, here is a brief overview of what Mock Trial entails:

Mock Trial is a team and competition-oriented activity where students take on the role of either a lawyer or witness (or both) and study a given case. The case outlines the facts of the civil or criminal matter, the relevant characters, and the trial materials needed. The team is then tasked with creating a theory of the case for trial and preparing witnesses for direct and cross examinations while also being ready to deliver opening and closing arguments. The team competes as one side, either plaintiff/prosecution or defense, at trial against another team, mirroring the steps of an actual trial.

I started with very little experience at all in public speaking and was actually quite terrified of it. During my first competition, I struggled tremendously to get out of my comfort zone and I didn’t perform as well as I would have liked to. When I later went to university, there was no active mock trial team, so my sophomore year I helped bring one to campus. This was the major change in my mock trial journey. Being able to not only compete in mock trial during two years of undergrad, but also help reinstate the organization and later be President helped me put my full effort behind it. It was only then that I realized how much I was interested in law school and oral advocacy in general.

Moot Court

I only started moot court at Columbia this past year. I am a part of the Frederick Douglass Moot Court team which handles issues related to social justice and civil rights. My experience transferred over nicely to moot court, but not nearly enough to make it an easy transition:

Moot court essentially requires students to pair up and conduct legal research for a given case. The case has already been tried at the trial court and is now being appealed to a higher court. The duo must then prepare a legal brief for either the Petitioner or Respondent side of the issue and submit the brief with full legal citations and formatting. In addition to the writing, the duo must then prepare to give an oral argument before the appellate court in hopes of winning for their side.

Participating in moot court during my first year was a challenge considering I was simultaneously learning how to conduct legal research and brief writing while writing my moot court brief. The most engaging part of the experience for me was the oral argument portion at Regional competition. Competition affirmed my interest in becoming a litigator; unlike mock trial I was able to form arguments using real caselaw and research which allowed me to apply skills that current litigators use every day.

Assessment of both

Based on my experience prior to law school working at a law firm and my discussions with several litigators during recruitment events, I believe I can now assess the skills from both organizations and how they carry over into a litigator’s practice. Mock Trial is usually done in teams of about 8-10 people, whereas moot court in my experience was simply two to a team. Litigators often work in teams on cases and have to interact with opposing counsel, and this mirrors mock trial more closely. Both activities involve heavy public speaking skills, but Mock Trial allows for better practice with passionate, argumentative interactions. Moot Court allows for better persuasive and legal speaking, but it is not as confrontational. Moot Court speaking skills can therefore carry over better for transactional and non-trial litigation attorneys, so this may actually be more encompassing. In terms of practical legal work, Moot Court is far more applicable to what attorneys do at law firms. Moot Court requires legal research and writing and a mastery of caselaw for relevant issues. This mirrors the work litigators do on a daily basis and is the foundation to being a great attorney.

Conclusion

Mock Trial and Moot Court are essential in developing public speaking, persuasion, and writing skills. These are beneficial to any professional, but I think these skills are invaluable to a litigator. Ultimately, I now see moot court as the more analogous activity to what litigators actually do in practice, so from that perspective it is more helpful. However, mock trial has the team aspect that mirrors the collaborative environment that attorneys often work in. Both organizations offer amazing development to a future litigator, but for those who have tried neither by the time they arrive at law school, I would recommend moot court.

It's that law school habit of mind to think that if our subject is A and B it can best be approached as A vs. B. Suppose we drop the reflex of confrontation for one draft and consider these two social processes as parts of a multiplicity.

Both, we could—as merely one example—begin by observing are a form of play. Mocks and moots are examples of "playing lawyer," which like clinical simulation allows us to learn by immersion in complex social processes (going to trial, briefing and arguing an appeal, interviewing a client) without having a license or being suable for malpractice. They are also an example of "pretend worlds," in which power relations are modified (lawyers pretend to be judges, judges in courts become judges of competition, etc.) and the Robinson's of the world can pretend to address judges with the freedom of long-practiced advocates. The role of such "virtual societies" might be deep in our human past, as my late friend David Graeber explored in his last work, with David Wengrow, the astonishing Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. They are not only a way human beings learn, but a way they experiment with alternate models of society. That is, how we change.

Or you could ask yourself a more personal set of questions, not based around asking what one or the other of these experiences is "for," but rather how—after participating in them—you are different. What did these experiences mean when you consider how they affect your ideas about the kinds of lawyering you want to do?

There are no doubt other ways to think in a unified way about these legal drama societies (historically, in relation to literature, and so on). My suggestions may not be the road you want to take. But it's the taking two things together instead of trying to separate them, synthesis rather than analysis to use the technical vocabulary, where I think improvement is to be found.

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