Acclaimed
advocates
BUILDING SKILLS
Students gain lawyering experience through competition training
Advocacy. “Our training has to forge all
those dynamics together, because you
cannot succeed in advocacy if you’re
not doing them all well.”
From the oldest type of
competition, moot court, to the
newest, ADR, Loyola believes
it’s important to offer all types
of competitions. “We look at it
holistically—we’re preparing our
students for whatever is asked of them
as advocates, from arguing at trial or in
appeal to participating in a successful
mediation,” says Megan Canty (JD ’07),
assistant director of the center.
Regardless of the type of
competition, team preparation
generally follows the same process.
Tryouts for the next year’s teams take
place in April and May. Students are
given a problem—less complicated
than the problems assigned for actual
competitions—and prepare for oral
arguments, with a written component
if they’re trying out for moot court.
Students may compete on only one
team per year, but many try out for
multiple teams, hoping to get several
offers from which they can choose.
Once a competition team is in
place, members practice three to six
days a week for a month to six weeks.
(The writing process for moot court
competitors starts four to six weeks
before oral arguments practice.) In
competitions that have both regional
and national rounds, teams advancing
from regional can expect to spend
another three to four weeks practicing
before the national competition.
The “biggest
building block”
The effort that goes into preparing
for competitions is tremendous, but
the payout is equally substantial.
“Moot court was
the single biggest
building block of my law education,”
says Abigail Peluso (JD ’07), an assistant
United States attorney for the Northern
District of Illinois. “The exercise of
learning to articulate yourself, plan for
different types of questioning, and look
at a problem from 360 degrees hasn’t
been duplicated in anything else I’ve
done. Moot court gives you a global
understanding of a legal question and
prepares you to talk about it not only
from both sides, but also in any area of
T
he law student was
nervous—really ner-
vous. In one of his first
practices for a moot
court competition, he
tried hard to emulate
the more assured speaking style of
other students, but came off stilted and
unpersuasive. His coach, Romeo Quinto
(JD ’00), spotted the problem immedi-
ately and knew just what to do about it.
“One of the most important parts
of coaching is helping students find
and highlight their individual speaking
abilities,” says Quinto, a partner at
Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, who
has been coaching Loyola moot court
teams since graduation and has served
as coach of the National Moot Court
team since 2007. Working with Quinto
to build his skills and confidence, the
student “went from very rough around
the edges to winning a best oralist
award in competition,”Quinto says. “He
had it; I could always see it, so it’s just a
matter of drawing it out.”
Loyola’s student competition
program is full of success stories like
this one. Part of the School of Law’s
nationally renowned Dan K. Webb
Center for Advocacy, the program
offers exceptional experiential learning
through opportunities to compete
in mock trial (trial advocacy), moot
court (appellate advocacy), and
alternative dispute resolution (ADR).
And, although Loyola has amassed
an impressive number of regional,
national, and international honors in
student competitions, the program’s
true mark of achievement, say alums, is
in the lifelong practical skills it imparts
to participants.
A bounty of
practical skills
Perhaps more than any other
experiential learning option at
the School of Law, competitions
offer students the opportunity to
dramatically expand and improve
their abilities in a relatively short
period of time.
“Competition preparation helps
students think critically, analyze the
law, apply it strategically to the needs
of their clients, and be persuasive in
oral and written presentation,” says
Zelda Harris, director of the Center for
2014-15 Criminal Law
Mock Trial team members
Liz Hanford (left), Sara
Whitecotton, and Andrew
Stevens in practice.
SPRING 2015
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LOYOLA LAW
