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Gomes's_Guilty_Conscious
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Join date : 2021-11-15

Tackling a New Case Empty Tackling a New Case

Mon Nov 15, 2021 4:07 pm
What strategies do you all recommend for tackling a new case with varying levels of time for preparation?

How do you approach a case in a highly confined set of time--for TBC or Top Gun;
a moderately constrained amount of time--Nationals or Law School invitationals, or;
a more significant period--regular-season competitions?

I was always taught to read legal background first, then exhibits, then witness statements before drafting anything. Still, I wondered if anyone had any suggestions to increase efficiency, especially when working under a more constrained time frame.
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jesneychesney07
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Join date : 2021-11-11

Tackling a New Case Empty Re: Tackling a New Case

Tue Nov 16, 2021 2:00 pm
In the regular season, I honestly don’t think your approach to the case matters very much. Unless you’re trying to win the first invitational you attend, there’s no great reason to spend hundreds of hours going through the case line by line. By the time ORCS rolls around, if you attend enough invitationals, you’ll have seen pretty much everything under the sun.

Nationals is the trickiest tightrope to walk, in my opinion. You're expected to achieve a remarkable level of polish in 3-4 weeks, and the only way to do it is to become insanely familiar with the case problem in the first few days. The way I read a case problem on a shorter timeframe is to skim the legal documents and then spend most of my time in the witness materials. I'll understand the story well, and then I'll go back and look at the legal framework in more detail with the facts of the case in mind. Read the case multiple times a day for those first few days. But the only way to truly familiarize yourself with how the case problem plays is to run a bunch of scrimmages before Nationals.

At TBC, you just have to be in triage mode the whole time. Read the legal stuff thoroughly, skim the witness materials and exhibits, and then start writing. Go back and re-read witness materials as you write examinations. The one advantage of the 24 hour prep window is that if you do it right, clarity should be less of an issue. It's easier to get bogged down in the details when you actually have time to pay attention to details. And you're less likely to lose sight of how hard it is for a mock trial juror to understand a case upon hearing the facts for the first time when you've just heard the facts for the first time the morning before.

MockforLife, joe_king and Gomes's_Guilty_Conscious like this post

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