Pictures to follow, but I thought I would take a moment while sitting in the softly lit upstairs lounge of my downtown Toronto hotel to talk about the mediation advocacy moot I just finished partipating in. Our team of five--two teams and our coach--left Vancouver Wednesday morning and will be coming back tomorrow. Coming back as finalists and prize winners, coming back a bit emotionally bruised but also, more lawyerly (if that's a word).
Our first round was against the team that we would eventually compete against in the finals, a team that went on to win the whole thing. And they were good. It was at this point I started to doubt we were a good mediation team and went into the next two semi-disasterous rounds with mediators snapping at me, cutting me off. I left the third round in tears, feeling the mediators and judges hated me. And then, we were told one of the four slots for the finals was going to us--and another one going to our collegues and practice-mates from UBC. It was such a triumphant moment!
After two months of practice--and a few very late nights--we had two hours to prepare for another go around. We ended up being eliminated. And it was disappointing. But I will always remember this mediation as the moment where I stepped into the larger Canadian legal community. And that's pretty damn cool.
As I sit here typing up my impressions, I am listening to David Gray's "This Year's Love," a song that has been running through my head off and on all day. Listening to the lyrics, they remind me a bit of my relationship to law school and the legal profession in general: moving from apathy to energy to disappointment to doubt to hope to wistfullness and back again. Pretty much everyday.
No comments:
Post a Comment