Leveraging Legal Simulations in Marketing: Understanding Moot Court vs Mock Trial
Exploring the Insights from Moot Court and Mock Trial
As marketers, we’re always on the lookout for new ideas. Sometimes those ideas come from out of left-field, leading to big rewards. Today we discuss how the concepts of ‘moot court’ and ‘mock trial’ can give us a fresh perspective on lead management and automation. Moot court and mock trial are often considered the province of law schools and will only be familiar to a few of us in the marketing realm. Still, these legal competitions can provide great insight and guidance for how we approach our revenue operations function.
The idea for this post came out of a conversation with a colleague and was expanded upon by a Google search which returned a page chockful of insights into mock trials and moot courts. A brief note about the differences between moot court and mock trial: Moot court is basically a simulated appeal process involving legal pleadings and a panel of judges. In this simulation, you have judges sitting as a panel who listen to both sides, typically the appellant and appellee, and ask questions about the case. There are usually written pleadings submitted to the judges, who base their decisions on them. By contrast, mock trials are basically a dress rehearsal trial, with opening arguments and closing statements, summons, and witness examinations. The audience plays the role of jurors. The cases are typically made up for the competition, not actual cases.
Both of them, however, are super-lucrative at building students’ skills and confidence in thinking and speaking critically in a logical fashion. Students learn to think on the fly, develop a persuasive writing style, and structure the output. Both of them have fairly standard rules that are adhered to across various different competitions.
My experience with mock trials comes from a college competition and it is a competitive, time-limited format in which you face off against other teams from colleges. These “trials” follow a similar format to actual trials, except that there is no jury and the judges are typically law students. It’s a high-pressure, high-stakes environment that forces participants to think quickly and adapt based on analysis of the testimony given by witnesses and other participants. The goal, obviously, is to win as many trials as possible against other colleges; but you also have to be mindful of your team’s overall performance.
What I learned in that mock trial experience taught me some valuable lessons about marketing that I still remember to this day. Specifically, I’d like to connect some of the dots to show how the legal session, the differences between moot court and mock trial, can help us develop stronger marketing tactics in the lead generation sphere. I wish I had brought a recording device so that I could have everything recorded and then put on repeat at my home office. Not only was it exhausting, but I got the impression that I was winning silent battles and losing out on lifestyle choices that would have been much more profitable to me.
Here are 10 ways to make legal competition strategies work for marketing. These first 5 are just a few elements from mock trial prep that I practiced and that I believe can be applied to a campaign planning and implementation strategy: And the next five are tactics that I’ve personally used in preparation for a presentation in anticipation of a competitive atmosphere: And the last 5 are a few of the ways I thought of may be different from the typical competitive analysis: It’s rewarding to see how the legal world can inform and influence marketing paradigms. If you need to motivate your sales team, perhaps consider running a mock trial competition amongst teams or even turn a debate into a contest. Create a score card and judge each situation/competitor/entity based on the criteria that is most important to you. Consider incorporating gamification of mitigation to drive your campaigns. Incorporate debate techniques into your presentations and speeches. Build a debate into a conference session. Plan out scenarios and what-if scenarios to anticipate various outcomes. Do your research and gather intel. Aim to strategize at least 6 months in advance.
