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The Client Interviewing Competition for England & Wales 2012
 

The Client Interviewing Competition is a pioneering and very successful national competition for law students. It is an annual event which focuses on the invaluable skills of interviewing and counselling and centres on a simulated law office interview.  Law students, working in teams of two, interview and advise a “client” -a role-playing actor. They are assessed according to well-established criteria which take into account interpersonal skills as well as their ability to handle a legal problem.  The prime aim of this competition is to promote the development of lawyers' soft skills and to enable law students to practise them at a high level.

This subject background to this year’s scenarios is Employers & Employees.

Entering a team
Each law school may enter one team made up two students. The students can be undergraduate or postgraduate law students. Each law school may select its team in any way that it considers appropriate, but usually this will be by way of an internal competition. No student may take part in this competition on more than one occasion even if they are now studying at a different institution. This is to ensure that the experience of taking part is open to as many students as possible.

The closing date for entries has now passed. 24 law schools have entered. 

Heats and finals
There will be two regional finals on 28th January 2012. These will be hosted by Northumbria and Leicester Universities.  Each team interviews 2 clients and eight or nine teams go forward to the national finals at the University of Sussex on 3rd March 2012. In the finals, each team interviews three clients. The highest scoring team over these rounds will be the winners. There is a reception in the evening.

The interviews
Interviews in this competition are always first interviews with new clients. The client has already been informed that the interview will cost £50+ VAT unless they are legible for public funding and that the law firm charges £150 + VAT per hour for future work.

International competition
The winning team receives a trophy and a prize from the Law Society Advocacy Training Sub-Committee. They are then invited to go on to compete in the 2012 Brown-Mosten International Client Consultation Competition which this year will be hosted by the Law Society of Ireland in Dublin from 18-21 April 2012. Click here for more details about the international competition. The 2011 national winning team from Sussex finished 8th in last year's international competition which was hosted by the University of Maastricht. 20 countries participated in the event.