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Monash mooters make their mark

14 September 2005

Three Monash Law students have won the junior level of the annual Governor General's Moot competition.

Monash students (left to right) Mr Andrew Bushnell, Mr Ed Russell and Mr Liam O’Connor with their mooting trophy.

Mr Ed Russell, Mr Liam O'Connor and Mr Andrew Bushnell defeated a team from Deakin University to win the final last month, having already eliminated the University of Melbourne in the preliminary round.

The competition is a mock appeal hearing based on questions of law, in this case a tort law problem, and is held at the Federal Court of Australia.

Each team was given the findings of a trial judge, and either the task of arguing the finding had been correctly applied or incorrectly applied.

Arguments were directed to Justice Alan Goldberg and Justice Shane Marshall of the Federal Court of Australia, who also tested speakers on their legal knowledge and composure.

Spokesman for the team, Mr Russell, who was rated overall best speaker, said the competition was a good experience for students interested in becoming barristers.

"It allows students to get a taste of what the Bar is like before they get there," he said.

"Each person speaks for 20 minutes and is then scored on their interaction with the Bench and the argument they have constructed.

"The fun of mooting definitely lies in having to formulate answers quickly and convey them convincingly.

"There were a few challenging questions posed by the judges, but we all really enjoyed ourselves."

Ms Rowena Cantley-Smith, Dr Brian Donovan and Dr Greg Taylor from the Faculty of Law coached the mooting team leading up to the competition.

Dr Taylor said the team had done extremely well.

"They practised hard and it showed. But they also had plenty of natural talent.

"There are a lot of practising barristers who would have been glad to build up the rapport with the Bench that our mooters managed to achieve," he said.

Monash also won the Client Interview competition, which is geared towards students interested in joining a corporate firm rather than going to the Bar.

Mr Igor Bakhilov and Ms Karen Allardice defeated the University of Melbourne to take out the title.

Their task was to elicit as much information as possible from their 'client' and they were judged by representatives from two leading commercial law firms.