The final of this year’s Warwick Law Society Internal Mooting Competition was held at the Supreme Court on 28 February. After a hard battle, second year law students Praveen Nair and Michelle Tan emerged the winners of the evening.

We caught up with them to find out more.

What is the Warwick Law Society’s Internal Mooting Competition?

It is the Law Society's largest annual mooting competition. This year, it was sponsored by Dentons and had 68 teams participating. It comprised of 5 rounds in total - 2 preliminary rounds, the quarter-finals, semi-finals, and the finals. The finals took place on the 28 February in the Supreme Court and were judged by Professor Alan Neal.

How did you prepare?

Apart from the usual preparations one might expect - conducting legal research, critically analysing the moot problems, consulting with our mooting mentors, producing bundles, rehearsing oral arguments, pre-empting what our opponents might say and preparing responses for that - one particular difficulty we faced this year was time management. Both of us have found our second year more academically demanding. Coupled with the fact that I'm on the executive committee for the ASEAN Conference, and Praveen is on the executive committee for the Malaysian Society, it was quite challenging for us to juggle our studies, our extracurricular commitments and mooting all at the same time.

The way we dealt with this was to divide the workload according to each other's schedules. For instance, Praveen did all the preparation for the bundles for the preliminary rounds, as I had essay deadlines and could not afford to spend as much time on mooting. Similarly, when Praveen had society commitments in the following weeks, I was in charge of researching his ground of appeal to make sure that he had enough material for his speech.

How does it feel to be the winners?

We were honestly surprised about winning, especially since Professor Neal said that he would allow the appeal (we were respondents)! We feel very grateful to the law society for providing us with not only the opportunity to receive feedback from professionals (the semi-finals were judged by solicitors) but also the opportunity to moot in the Supreme Court.

Apart from the constant encouragement from the law society to take part in mooting, I was fortunate enough to have a mentor from the International and European Law Society who walked me through preparing for moots step by step way back in my first year, so that Praveen and I knew exactly what to expect from mooting competitions. Without his help, we would never have survived the preliminary rounds of the First-Year moot, and I'm not sure if Praveen and I would have had the courage to continue mooting. Looking back, it is really the support of fellow law students that made this all possible!

What advice would you give to future participants?

For us, mooting required consistent effort, and we believe that we've only achieved this result because we dedicated a lot of time to mooting since day one of our degree. Last year, we only got to the semi-finals for the First Year Moot, then lost at the preliminary rounds for the Internal Moot, and got to the finals for the HSF Commercial Moot. In total (including this year's internal moot), we have participated in 5 competitions and mooted 14 times since starting university, so reaching the finals of this competition was certainly not an overnight achievement.

Congratulations again to Michelle Tan and Praveen Nair for this great success! Congratulations also to San Wen Ngei and Jer Ning Teo who made it to the finals, which is an excellent achievement.

Find out more about mooting and the Warwick Law Society.