Becoming An Effective Advocate

I am of the mindset that all advocates are lawyers but not all lawyers are advocates. That is, anyone with a law degree is a lawyer but to be an advocate is to stand in a court, whether that’s one of public opinion or of the law, and persuasively represent a client, cause, or policy. Learning to become an effective advocate through this moot process has required developing good advocacy practices as well as having a lot of patience. The advocacy practices I have developed include the ability to distill facts, organize them, and a draft a persuasively written factum and use that document to persuade an audience to arrive at the same conclusion as I. It was required of us to submit our factum prior to the moot, the written argument thus provided …show more content…
This is an onerous task because an assessment of the facts and the state of the law have to be intricately tied. For the preliminary factum, we did not possess a thorough knowledge of the facts and the state of the law and as such our arguments lacked depth and detail. Once we developed a thorough knowledge of the facts and had an opportunity to analyze the respondent's factum, we realized good writing only comes with a great deal of effort and time-consuming iterations of drafts. The key to written advocacy is perseverance because one has to continuously analyze the facts to expose strengths and weaknesses of the arguments and evaluate the content. Writing out the arguments helped to better understand the cases and weave them into our legal issues and to refine, recast and redefine our legal argument. To then present our arguments to the judges in a manner that the only legal conclusion that could possibly be arrived was an obvious one was a difficult task as we had to convey our knowledge of the facts to a busy judge who was unfamiliar with them. Thus, any lack of understanding or knowledge of the facts on our part negatively impacted our ability to communicate them in a clear, concise fashion. Having a thorough knowledge of how the case law applied to the case at bar was key in allowing us to clearly and concretely convey our