Advocacy Training

At Cumberland we pride ourselves on being a law school whose mission is to train lawyers to be advocates. That advocacy training is important whether you are a lawyer who spends time in the courtroom or the boardroom. Advocacy training teaches you to marshal facts into a coherent argument and to think on your feet. Those skills are important whether you are a courtroom lawyer or a lawyer who represents clients in major financial transactions. Those skills are also important as you represent clients in mediation and arbitration.

One measure of our advocacy training is the success our student teams have in national competitions. By any measure, this has been a banner year.Cumberland teams have won the regionals of the two most prestigious mock trial tournaments of the spring, the National Trial Competition and the American Association for Justice (AAJ) National Student Advoacy Competition. Cumberland teams will compete in the national finals of those competitions later in the year. For the second year in a row, a Cumberland Team has advanced to the national finals of the ABA National Appellate Advocacy Competition. That competition will be in Chicago in a few weeks. In addition, last weekend, a Cumberland team finished in the top 8 out of 48 in the 17th Annual Bankruptcy Moot Court competition at St. John's Law School in New York. This marked our first appearance in this prestigious tournament

Our successes this year are a tribute to the hard work of the students and their coaches but also serve to underscore the correctness of our approach to legal education which emphasizes both theory and practicality. We all wish our teams well as the they seek to bring more national championships home to our law school.