Selecting Moot Court Teams

In the next couple of weeks, hundreds of moot court teams around the world will be receiving fact patterns and engaging in the painstaking task of deciphering the case, researching relevant law, and drafting briefs for submission to the competition.  As I await the release of the Wagner fact pattern in order to go over it with my team, I have been contemplating the best way to select moot court teams, the best way to divide the research and brief writing responsibilities for the team, and the best way to attack oral argument preparation.  Over the course of the next week I would like to explore each of these steps in the preparation process.  

As it relates to picking teams, I am only very familiar with the processes utilized at the school where I graduated and the school where I currently teach.  When I was at Capital Law, students competed against each other in order to be selected for a team.  More specifically, each competition had a tryout period for students to submit a brief and perform an oral argument before the selection committee (members of the moot court board and the faculty advisor(s)).  The best competitors were then selected to compete on the respective teams.  Since I have graduated, I hear they now have created a succession-planning process of sorts, where a moot court “fellow” will work with and travel with the team the first year and then has the opportunity to compete on the team or some other team in the subsequent year.

At ASL, we do not have fellows, but we do have student assistant coaches.  These are students that perform admirably in oral and/or written advocacy and, with a little extra tutoring and observation of the process, will likely get a chance to actually compete the next year.  While this process is similar to the fellows program, what we do that is different is that we mandate that students take AppAd before they can be considered for a team (the same is true for the assistant coaches).   At the end of the semester, the students present their oral arguments, and moot court coaches usually observe these arguments in order to see the best advocates and decide, in consultation with the other coaches and the AppAd professors (to ascertain their brief writing skills), which students will receive moot court team invitations.  The moot court board plays no role in the selection of advocates.  

While our process has created some very competitive teams, there are some schools out there that seem to excel every year in moot court.  Stetson Law immediately comes to mind.  My understanding is that they have a faculty member who’s sole job is to oversee the selection and coaching of the moot court teams.  If this is accurate, that is dedication!  Some schools let their moot court boards do the team selection and coaching.  Some use adjuncts or law firm partners to select and coach the teams instead of full-time faculty, and some even pay their faculty for their time commitment with the selection and coaching process.

There are a lot of different ways to go about selecting competitive teams.  I am curious to find out what some other schools are doing.  I hope to get feedback from some of the readers.