James Barrett

Overall Experience

We had fun and are grateful for the experience. The competition was excellently hosted and friendly. It was nice to see the Melbourne University faculty, local barristers and former judges involved and willing to chat to competitors at length. We highly recommend this competition. This brief piece serves as an honest reflection on our experience and advice to future competitors.

Accommodation and Transportation

We flew from Canberra. The inconvenience of flying from Sydney didn’t appear cost-effective. We arrived about 3pm the day before registration. We left the afternoon after the competition. This was ideal.

We booked an AirBnB place near Queen Victoria Markets about 12 minutes’ walk from Melbourne Uni. There was no stress with transport, and although there some tight turn-arounds between commitments, we had time to drop our stuff at home, refresh, work there and use Melbourne Uni facilities when needed.

Written Submissions

Here we focus on teams that clearly put in much effort. The difference in memorial quality – both in depth of research and answering the questions – was obvious only to better competitors and judges. Some judges said, fairly, our memorials were dense, with lots of work done through footnotes. Judges who weren’t well acquainted with the area missed nuances and liked readability.

Moots

The standard of oral presentation was high and the preliminary judges’ expertise in the area varied. We realised it was best to start by assuming nothing of the judge, gauge how to work with them during the moot, and state the flaws in opposing arguments simply, ruthlessly and respectfully.

Our key strength was collective depth of research. This meant we could: (1) pick the best arguments early; (2) resort to on-point authority in tricky situations; (3) understand the underly- ing principles and debates; (4) react to the other side’s arguments put at their highest, within our own structure. Those strengths helped our delivery. We honed our use of authority towards the judges’ backgrounds, without just saying they should accept things because they had said them before. In the grand final both teams had amazing presentation but our strengths made the difference.

Team Dynamics

By rotating speaking roles between the three of us in the preliminary rounds we balanced fatigue-management with expertise on particular roles. For the finals, we unanimously chose speakers with greatest depth of knowledge and therefore the best ability to react to questions which were hard or sniped weak spots in our arguments.

We were friends before the competition, but there were tense times. We gave constructive feedback when appropriate, with the mutual understanding that it was for everyone’s benefit.