With the 27th edition of the Vis Moot under way (and the 10th in which I am involved as coach and arbitrator), it has only taken five days for my annual interaction with a colleague asking me why I coach our Vis Moot team, and what is the point. Indeed, at first glance it may seem counter-productive: the University gives me 16 hours per term to coach the team, and I usually spend 20 hours in the first two weeks of preparation - which means that I basically take time off research or rest to coach the team; if (rectius, when) we do not win I am responsible, but the credit for any success goes to the students (and rightly so); I am not a PhD student and I do not need to go to Vienna with a team to enlarge my network - at this point in my career, I pretty much know who I need to know and I can be introduced to those I do not, and my yearly trip to Vienna is sufficiently justified by the desire to watch my team competing, arbitrating one or two good teams, and ingest as many wienerschnitzel and bratwurst as humanly possible (feel free to email me for recommendations).
So, why do I Vis Moot? I borrowed the title of this post neither from George Orwell nor from James Boyd White (who remains one of my professional heroes) but from Yale Kamisar who, in 2005, published an article in the San Diego Law Review (also available on SSRN) in which he agreed with Orwell that writing is hard, is not exactly fun, is not financially rewarding, and yet it is necessary. Coaching a Vis Moot team is not unlike the process of writing an article: you set up a team made of who you think, at the time of choosing, are the best students; you work on and with them to analyse a complex problem; you write a first draft, then a second, then a third and you submit it as the memorandum for the Claimant; then you go over the whole thing once again from a different angle, and you submit the memorandum for the Respondent; then you have a few months of further work, until you go to Vienna where, just like with an article, your odds are 10% to pass the first round and 0,25% to end up winning the competition (ok, writing may be slightly easier). It is hard, it is not fun - it may be satisfying, but spending countless hours talking about replacement of turbines with people in their early 20s is not my definition of "fun" - and it is not financially rewarding (Vienna is a city designed to make you spend money in culture and delicious food). It is, however, necessary.
An arbitrator, last year, said out loud that any law school worth taking seriously must send a team to the Vis Moot. That may be an exaggeration - there are at least four schools I profoundly respect that do not send a team to the Vis Moot - but, generally speaking, I agree. There are obvious exceptions - such as schools for which commercial law is little more than an afterthought - but it is hard to maintain that a certain school's students are excellent if they are not even given the chance to measure themselves against the best law students the rest of the world has to offer. In fact, the educational value of the Vis Moot is much greater than its competitive aspect. Let us be clear on one point: the competition is crucial, it drives students to go the extra mile to provide the best representation possible to a client that is not real from a fictional country the name of which may or may not be easy to pronounce, and the carrot of the oral rounds makes the stick of the hard work in the months preceding them much more tolerable. Furthermore, every coach wants to look good, and bring students that will not embarrass themselves and their coach in the process. Having said that, the competition should not be the primary engine moving a coach work; it surely is not mine. The satisfaction, at least in my case, comes from the Big 4: knowledge, writing, advocacy, teamwork.
At Leicester we build a team of mostly, if not exclusively, undergraduate students. Their knowledge of arbitration at the beginning of the year is close to non-existent, with the rare exception of students who had taken the international commercial arbitration module the previous year, and the acronym CISG might as well be an abbreviation of "cisgender". Three months later, they debate on the scope of party autonomy better than LLM students; if they take the Moot seriously, they end up knowing more about the specific issues raised by the Vis Moot problem than a lot of PhD students. The role of the coach here is minimal: unless one decides to write the memorandum for their students, it is them that will have to read, research, process and understand the law. It is a beautiful process, and it usually puts the Vis Moot team members one notch above the rest of their cohort. It sounds trite, but the Vis Moot really speeds up the transition from law student to lawyer; and call me cheesy all you want but, as a coach, playing a tiny part of the process is priceless.
Being an avid reader, I cherish good writing. Every academic has to go, at least twice a year, through the gruesome process of marking. Whilst nobody expects 3000 words on property law to read like Sastre's thoughts penned by Jane Austen, only a handful of essays in every batch are clear, concise, structured, nicely phrased and well-referenced; the vast majority, even those who show that the author has done their homework, knows the law and is capable of interpreting it, are extremely poorly written and made even harder to read by rather questionable structural choices (or lack thereof). Indeed, writing is a skill - the teaching of which is a core part of a Vis Moot coach. At the same time, it is likely the thankless, menial element of coaching. Students tend to notice - because it is pretty evident - their dramatic improvement in legal knowledge, in rhetoric ability and in working with others; they are, however, usually oblivious as to their progress, over the first term, in legal writing. Moreover, not everybody reaches the same level by the submission of the Respondent's memorandum: while hard work may trump talent in the long term, in three months it is much easier to take a reasonably talented student to being capable of writing in a striking and efficient way than to correct years of non-existent training and little familiarity with the printed word. Moreover, the competitive aspect of the Moot gets in the way: in the end, the best writers in the team will end up finalising the memoranda, and they will be the ones reaping the rewards of the training.
The opposite can be said with regard to the advocacy skills. Here the competitive side of the Vis Moot does not (or should not) hamper the development of every member of the team. Obviously certain teams will privilege the designated speakers, when not focusing solely on them; at the end of my career, should I never take a team past the preliminary rounds, I will possibly think that I should have been more selective and only focused on four students per year. However, I do not think this is a healthy strategy when coaching a dozen or so students in their early twenties: should one sacrifice the development of the students who spend countless hours working on an extracurricular activity - hours that could be spent studying their modules, doing sports, playing music or even partying, not to mention the obvious - on the altar of a win that may not arrive anyways, in light of the countless factors at play in Vienna? I would rather work on the entire team - or at least those that would like a chance to speak in Vienna, fully knowing that in the end they may not make the cut - and see everybody reach a minimum threshold below which I would have to declare my work a failure. It may sound naïve, but every Vis Moot coach experiences that despairing (at least in the first years of coaching) moment, in January, when even reasonably intelligent students struggle to introduce themselves to a fictional arbitrator. These, however, are the same students that by mid-March would be able to entertain a discussion on jurisdiction or specific performance with people who have dealt with these issues on a daily basis for the better part of the last 30 years. Most students in Vienna tend to forget the amount of work they have put on to reach that level - a sentiment similar to every new doctor who, right after passing their viva, feel like they could get a second PhD in a couple of weeks as they now know how to. A diligent coach, however, does not forget those moments in January: and seeing my students holding their own with established practitioners and academics is one of the few reasons why I teach (let us face it, the second lecture of the cycle on the powers of the arbitral tribunal is not exactly the highlight of my year).
Finally, a word on teamwork. Law schools teach many things - some valuable, some utterly pointless - but they do not encourage the exchange of intellectual experiences. There is the time factor: we tend to cram students' schedules with contact time that is close to useless, leaving very little room for reflection, discussion and alternative perspectives. There is a general lack of trust in young women and men that are considered old enough to go to war, but not old enough to decide whether they want to attend a lecture or not and how much of a chapter will actually be useful. There is, moreover, the possibility - or risk - of plagiarism or collusion, which leads to an implied encouragement to work alone, and leave exchange with classmates to social occasions. The consequence is that most law students do not trust classmates to do part of a work that will have their own name on - a reasonable position, not knowing much about others' attitudes and working habits - and struggle to embrace working in a team, not realising at first that the memoranda are hard to write properly with a team of 10, extremely difficult with a team of 5, prohibitive for a couple of students and simply impossible alone (I am curious to be proven wrong, but it would not change my idea that working alone is a waste of a great opportunity). By the end of January, however, students are not only able to rely on each other: they are also conscious of the strengths and weaknesses of their teammates, and - knowingly or not - they actively put every teammate in a position to succeed (unless they fight and try to sabotage each other, but I am as optimistic as very attentive to the dynamics of the team).
Before this post is misunderstood as an elegy of Vis Moot coaching and colleagues start rushing to get a team and have some teaching-related fun, let us disclose the whole truth. Coaching a Vis Moot team is psychologically exhausting, and I would lie if I did not admit that every year, as soon as I leave Vienna, I tell my wife that I am done with the Vis Moot and someone else should take my place. It is a feeling that lasts for a couple of days only, but it is there every year, for a number of different reasons - the main one being that it is impossible to coach the Vis Moot as a teacher. Many colleagues know this perfectly and are aided by PhD students in the daily management of the team - a strategy that helps them keep their sanity and a certain objectivity and detachment from the students. Honestly, I wish I had the budget to do so; unfortunately, I am not in the slavery racket and, since I cannot pay my PhD students extra to coach the team nor I can take them to Vienna with me as a reward, I have to do the job alone or with a colleague whose schedule does not allow him to spend one tenth of the time I spend with the squad. Therefore, between September and April I see the Vis Moot students immensely more often than any other student enrolled in my modules. Sometimes I coach, getting involved in legal reasoning or advocacy techniques. Sometimes I teach, when we write or when we structure an argument prior to the hearings. Sometimes I just listen: these young women and men may be legally allowed to vote, drive, drink and enlist in the army, but they are also students, working hard for an education besides a degree, coping with stress, expectations, uncertainty about the future, doubts. We have all been 20, and some of these 20-year olds are more mature than I was at their age. If they need to vent, I shut up and listen. If they want advice, I will give it to them. If they have a complaint about a teammate, I have to try and understand what is really going on. And, as long as it remains always clear who is in charge, if they want to break the tension by making a joke at my expenses, I laugh with them at myself. They would not be able to do any of this in class; in class, however, I would not have the power to kick them out, to push them to their limits and beyond, to demand excellence. In class I have never cared whether the students like me or not, but with the Vis Moot I have to accept that, even though I will spend a lot of time with these people, I will not be liked for a few months - in fact, I have to almost seek a certain tension to ensure that they discover their talents, their skills, and that their ceiling is much higher than they thought. This, however, has a very high price. The Vis Moot is not a class, where one can come in, lecture, answer a few questions and then forget about it until the following year. The Vis Moot takes everything one has got; it is tough, demanding and emotionally draining.
And it is worth every second of it.