Moot Court Teams – Writing The Brief
Last week I pondered the best way to select advocates for moot court teams. Today I would like to look at dealing with the research and writing component of the process.
Most moot court teams consist of two advocates, although a few competitions allow for three advocates per team and even fewer allow for a separate brief writer to be assigned to each respective team. Assuming that a separate brief writer is not allowed by the competition rules (because with a brief writer, I assume this person would be charged with the entire brief writing process and would share the researching duties with the oral advocates), what is the best way to divide the responsibilities between the team members? I must admit that I have bounced between methods with no real idea which is preferable.
The first method that I have used when having a two-person team is to assign each team member one of the issues (most moot court competitions have two distinct issues in the problem). Each team member is responsible for researching his/her own issue and writing the portion of the brief on that issue. Once both advocates have written their sections, they would then collaborate to infuse the two parts into one succinct and cohesive brief that hopefully will read as if it written by only one person. Admittedly, this blending of two parts to make it sound like one voice can be difficult to accomplish, especially when the students have vastly different writing styles, grammatical effectiveness, and timeliness in having their respective sections done and ready to undergo the infusion process. For example, if one person is done with his/her draft with a week remaining before the brief is due to the competition but the other student is not done until two days before the deadline, it is almost impossible to properly proofread and join the parts so that they read as if written by one person.
Realizing this problem, I have also explored having one person solely responsible for writing the brief with the other person being responsible for assisting with the research, formatting of the brief (such as the table of contents and authorities), and proofreading the brief. This tends to create two problems, with one bleeding into the other. The first problem is that the brief writer tends to complain that the other student is not adequately assisting (such as not providing substantive research assistance) with the writing process. If this is indeed true, the second problem usually ends up being that the non-brief writer ends up having to play catch-up when it is time to prepare for oral argument. The person writing the brief is usually much more intimately familiar with the facts and the law while the other is much less comfortable with the material due to taking a back seat during the brief writing process. So while this method ensures that the brief reads with one voice, it can cause team friction and impair the oral argument practice sessions due to having to spend extra time getting the non-brief writer up-to-speed on the case.
How have you attacked this problem? Might there be a third or fourth alternative approach?
In the next post, we will explore oral argument practice protocol.