| Prudence |
02-22-2007 08:39 PM |
Round one is over - and as predicted, I argued tonight.
What a subjective piece of crap this all is. Everything our coaches drilled us to do, the judges hated. And I'm certain the judges were all trial attorneys and/or judges, as they *loved* one of our opponents - they loved his "informal style". Oh, they admitted it would be totally inappropriate for arguing before the Supreme Court, which was what this was supposed to emulate, but rather than ding him for being too informal they rewarded him for being such a good future trial attorney. Which would be great, if this was a mock trial. But it's not. Grrrr. As another infamous poster might say: I call shenanigans.
Three of five judges gave me second to last ranking. One judge ranked me last. The last judge ranked me first, with the highest individual score of any of the 4 competitors from any judge. So one of them loved me, and it had to be either the skinny guy in the middle on the bottom row or the soft-spoken black guy with an accent on the top row. Wish I knew, although it's not like that info would serve me any benefit.
Anyhow - technically we lost the argument by a slight margin, because 4 of 5 judges were so smitten with mr. trial court who made jokes with the judges and left the podium half-way through his argument to retrieve his binder, bring it back to the podium, flip through to find what page something was on, and then returned the binder to its resting place on the center table. WTF?
However, in this round our brief score counted for 1/3 of the total, and we did well enough on the brief that we actually won the round overall. So, we're 1 and 0.
And, the mean coach said several times that I did a really amazing job. And since what I want to do when I graduate is what she does for a living, and since she's local to me, knows what I want to do, and has the appropriate connections, it's probably more important for her to like what I did than for the NY attorneys to have liked what I did. (Although, I must reiterate, one did like what I did, and a LOT.)
Anyhow, one round is done. Tomorrow I'm the time keeper and don't have to argue. Tomorrow night I find out whether I will be arguing or time keeping Saturday morning. And anything further depends on how we do in that third round Saturday, because after that we only keep going if we win the round, and the brief scores will no longer count.
So, no thinking tomorrow!
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