Cashing in on the weekend of four grand moots including India’s best and India’s second oldest, some law schools managed to upset the Herbert Smith Freehills-sponsored Mooting Premier League (MPL) season 5 pecking order, while others held fort.

NLU Jodhpur won DM Harish – the only Indian moot on MPL’s world class moots category, NLIU Bhopal flew back into the league’s top spot after winning Surana & Surana’s corporate law moot and a hoard of other citations, while NLSIU Bangalore took away GNLU’s GIMC and India’s second oldest moot – the Kerala Law Academy moot.

However the law school that took away the weekend with a grand total of 53 MPL points was ILS Pune, jumping from 17th spot on the MPL table to rank six.

NLU Delhi was absent from the weekend, while NUJS Kolkata, JGLS Sonepat, and Amity Delhi were the others in the top 10 whose presence was missed this weekend and who slipped in ranks.

The mooting circuit was abuzz with action at Mumbai, Kerala, Gandhinagar and Mysore, in addition to right here on the Legally India Blogs.

DM Harish

NLU Jodhpur speakers Pooja Menon and Vanshika Mohta and researcher Sakshi Singh clinched the 15^th DM Harish International at GLC Mumbai, along with citation for best memorial.

Adding to the world class standard of the moot, the organisers boosted transparency this time by providing the score breakdown of each participating team to every other team at the end of each round at the moot, Menon told Legally India.

As a winning strategy, Menon vouched for the effectiveness of “breaking down” the arguments for the benefit of judges who’d likely not be as well versed with the moot problem as the team which had been preparing for the competition for four months.

ILS Pune made a killing of 25 tier 2 points by coming in runners up and its researcher Catherine P Joseph winning the best researcher citation at the moot.

Semi finalist NLUO Cuttack also picked up the best speaker citation through Priyanka Murali. NLIU was the other semi finalist.

[Check out GLC’s live blog for the blow-by-blow account and pictures]

Old school KLA

Initially thrown off by the unexpected lack of a memorial exchange at the moot, and escaping a close call in its preliminary rounds NLSIU’s team of mooting debutantes finally managed to take away the 25^th edition of India’s second-oldest moot.

The law school’s team of third year students also won two other citations here, which are not worth MPL points.

Speakers Debanjana Mukherjee and Apurva Shukla and researcher Harshvardhan Goel made up the winning team.

“The only thing which matters is how simple and clear your law is and how applicable it is to the moot proposition. Nothing fancy matters - no fancy compendium, outside cases, constitutional bench case law. As long as you’re making sense, [you’ll do well]. That is the general approach in your mooting which you should have,” commented Shukla.

Shukla noted that the moot was still carrying along certain old school features such as no exchange of memorials between opposing teams before rounds, the preliminary round was one huge Octa-final from which 16 out of 45 participating teams broke for the quarter finals based on absolute scores, making it quite hard to break for teams whose speaker scores are not enough in that round, there was no separate deadline for online submission of memorials which had to be submitted at the venue at the time of the rounds, and there was no provision for seeking clarifications to the moot problem.

NLIU, winners of best memorial, picked up MPL points here as well, alongside runners up Symbiosis Pune, semi finalists Nalsar Hyderabad and Pravin Gandhi law college, and best speaker Anusam Dash from NLUO.

GIMC

NLSIU speakers Isha Jain and Gaurav Bhawani and researcher Harshvardhan Sunder meanwhile landed the weekend’s other victory for Bangalore, at GNLU Gandhinagar’s 6th GIMC.

Sunder attributed the win to the team’s “structure of argumentation” and being “mentally prepared for [the] kind of questioning [which they eventually faced] from the judges”, thanks to several internal practice rounds judges by law school seniors.

This team of first year students was making its mooting debut, and faced the USA’s George Washington School of Law in the finals.

ILS Pune won the best memorial while Christ University’s Apoorva was adjudged the best speaker.

The second Nalsar team mooting this weekend reached semi-finals alongside HNLU Raipur.

[GNLU’s excellent live blog of the competition is well worth a read for the lowdown of what happened!]

Surana & Surana corporate moot

NLIU speakers Shaswat Sharma and Hirak Mukherjee and researcher Ankita Sharma bested RMLNLU Lucknow at Mysore. The team went on to win this year’s Surana corporate moot which was based on transfer pricing, after “some nervous moments” induced by a close call in the quarter finals, claimed Sharma.

“We nearly had a scare in the quarter finals. We [made the cut] by a small margin of just 8 points, so we almost lost to NLU Cuttack,” commented Sharma.

Sharma told Legally India that Bhopal has seen an “unofficial’ internal mooting policy ramp us this season which involves practicing oral rounds more than before.

“NLIU Bhopal always had been good at mooting. Last year we probably didn’t have luck in place, this yar luck has been kinder,” he said.

Bhopal wound up the weekend’s spate of citations with the best memorial in this moot while Nalsar’s Pranav Verma was adjudged the best speaker. GNLU and UPES Dehradun reached the semi finals.

League trends

NLSIU justifies the top spot in the league at the moment, by raking up the maximum number of wins so far – a total of five including the Jessup regional moot, however NLIU which falls one win short of NLSIU has still managed to dethrone Bangalore.

Bangalore has now replaced NLU Delhi which had reserved second place with last season’s Manfred Lachs world rounds cut, despite just one mooting win so far this season.

NLUO has been a new force to reckon with this season beating NLU Jodhpur to third place, despite Jodhpur’s leading score of 50 in the tier two and more overall wins than Orissa. Bulking up on tier four citations have been Orissa’s recipe for jumping ranks this season.

Reaching the semi finals of several tier 4 moots is the most that can be given to Nalsar’s credit so far, though the season waits to see Hyderabad’s performance at the Jessup world rounds for which it qualified last weekend.

Correction: An earlier version of the story mentioned NLIU as claiming second spot on the league table, due to a calculation error. After correction, NLIU has now claimed the top spot. GLC was also erroneously awarded organiser points for DM Harish, in which it in fact participated.

Upcoming moot: ULC Bangalore National moot (Feb 22- 23)

At a glance: By law school

At a glance: By moot

MPL 5 Season Rankings