Mooting: Say, what now?

Moot (noun): a mock judicial proceeding set up to examine a hypothetical case as an academic exercise.

Yes, that's the dictionary term for a moot. If you're a seasoned law student, you should be very familiar with the term. However, if (like me) you're new to law school, you won't have a clue what it really means - beyond the dictionary definition. This post aims to enlighten you, based on my recent foray into mooting.

I knew I wanted to try out mooting as soon as I joined university. It's trumpeted as this amazing opportunity to: boost your CV; gain experience of advocacy; write skeleton arguments; respond to judicial intervention etc.; get to grips with court formalities; get a taste of life as a barrister. And those 'trumpeters' weren't wrong! I highly recommend it - especially if you think you want to become a barrister or have a career as an adversarial advocate.

I entered a novice competition in my first year at university with a fair amount of trepidation and a healthy dose of naivety - thinking it would be a fun few hours and look good on my CV. While this turned out to be partly true, there was a lot of extra work involved and at times, being a complete novice, I felt I was way out of my depth and had made a mistake in entering. Also, what I thought was a fairly chilled out moot, actually was a quite serious competition with multiple rounds in front of career judges. It may surprise you (and it certainly surprised me) that I got through to the semi-finals.

In the hopes that it might help those of you who are as in-the-dark as I was, I've come up with a list of helpful hints, truth-bombs and tips.

Read the rest of the article on Silks And The City here...