Ever witnessed a Spanish bull fight? Imagine the anxiety of the matador waiting on the bull to charge and raising his cloth just in time to side track the raging animal.

Sound familiar?

That’s exactly how I felt standing before our mock judge about to deliver my first submission.

Mooting. It’s a sport. The ability to present, deliver and persuade the court to act in your favor either comes naturally or with much practice. A lot of law students fail to realise that clarity, relevance and getting straight to the point with your law scores more points than the number of judgments you can rattle within the time given.

You quickly learn from this when you are politely interrupted and asked to state your point or you run out of time and realise you had much more to say.

Mooting! Is it important? Very!

The first moot I presented covered contract law and the ability to define who a consumer is and when a company is entitled to an exclusion clause; it really opened my eyes to the law on real life terms.

I had to learn how to share responsibility between myself the senior respondent and my partner the junior respondent. That meant getting an 8am start in the library to research on judgments that related to our defense and getting home at 8pm to read over my submissions, read why Lord Denning made the red-hand rule and understand what it meant!

I learnt to colour code, highlight, tab and structure my arguments into the three main points and then photocopy and do the same for the appellant and judge.

Most of the times in preparation were spent fighting with my junior respondent as to how many pages were needed in the bundle for each submission.

On the day of the moot, how I remembered to keep a cool head, direct the judge to pages of my highlighted submissions and relate its relevance to the case in point and say thank you, your Lordship after his points still remain a wonder to me.

I will always remember the feedback we were given as senior and junior respondents.

To my mooting partner: You remind me of a swan, gracefully treading the water on the surface but paddling frantically away underneath, your brain working away a mile a minute, this has shown me how hard you’ve worked.

To myself: Two words, you were good, very good!

The satisfaction you feel after winning the moot is indescribable.

Try it. You’ll be surprised at what you make of it.

To comment on this blog write to Roxanne at blogs@elephantminds.co.uk