The 30-minute rapid moot: a checklist for the night before opening

It is 21:15. Opening is at 10:00. The skeleton is filed, the bundle is paginated, and the thing you cannot shake is a feeling that one of your three pleaded grounds is softer than the other two and you are not sure which.

Half an hour in Trial & Arbitration Simulation will not make the ground firmer. It will tell you which one it is, and what the tribunal is likely to ask about it first. Here is how to spend the thirty minutes.

Minutes 0 to 5: choose the room

Pick the venue. Simulation models 22, and the differences are not cosmetic: the modelled tribunal’s appetite for interruption, its tolerance of rhetorical openings, and the weight it gives to documentary evidence over oral all vary with venue and with the tribunal profile you select.

Select a tribunal profile that matches what you know. If you know the chair’s published awards lean towards close textual readings of the contract, choose the textual profile. If you know nothing, choose the venue default and resist the temptation to pick the profile you would prefer.

Load the bundle selectively. The skeleton, the pleadings, and the three exhibits you will actually take the tribunal to in opening. Not the whole bundle. A rapid moot with four hundred pages loaded is not rapid and the tribunal’s questions will wander into documents you were never going to open tomorrow.

Minutes 5 to 15: run the opening

Deliver your opening as you intend to deliver it, by voice or by text, without stopping to improve it. Opposing counsel will respond. The tribunal will interrupt. Answer the interruptions as you would tomorrow, briefly, and carry on.

Do not pause to fix things. The purpose of the first run is to find out what happens to the opening you have, not to rehearse the opening you wish you had. Notes can wait; the scorecard will remember what you forgot.

One thing to watch for in real time: the point at which the tribunal’s questions stop being about your strongest ground and start being about something else. That moment is usually the most informative part of the half-hour.

Minutes 15 to 20: read the scorecard

Four things on the scorecard matter tonight.

Liability confidence is the modelled tribunal’s estimate, after your opening and the response, that your client succeeds on liability. Read it as a direction, not a probability. A number that moves between runs is telling you something; its absolute level is a model’s opinion about a model.

Award range is the band the modelled tribunal considers plausible if liability is established. Tonight it matters mainly as a check that your quantum case was heard at all. A range that bears no relation to your pleaded figure means the opening did not make the figure stick.

Weakest pleading is the ground on which the modelled tribunal’s confidence is lowest, with the two or three questions it would put to you about it. This is the answer to the 21:15 feeling. It is also, in our experience, correct more often than counsel expects, which is uncomfortable and useful.

Unanswered questions lists the tribunal’s interruptions that your response did not address directly. Read these twice. Tomorrow’s tribunal is not the model, but the questions are rarely idiosyncratic.

Minutes 20 to 30: fix one thing and run it again

One thing. Not three. Pick the weakest pleading’s first unanswered question, decide how your opening will answer it, change that part of the opening, and run again with the same venue, the same profile and the same bundle.

Compare the scorecards. If liability confidence rose and the weakest pleading changed, the fix worked and you now know the second-weakest ground. If liability confidence fell, you have learned that your fix opened a door, and it is better to learn that at 21:45 than at 10:20.

Then stop. A third run at this hour improves the model’s opinion of your opening more than it improves your opening. Go to bed.

Checklist

• Venue chosen to match the real seat, not the one you know best.
• Tribunal profile chosen from what you know, not what you hope.
• Bundle: skeleton, pleadings, three exhibits. Nothing else.
• First run: deliver the real opening, answer interruptions, do not stop.
• Note the moment the questions change subject.
• Scorecard: liability confidence as direction, award range as a sanity check, weakest pleading as the answer, unanswered questions read twice.
• One change. Same settings. Second run.
• Compare. Stop.

A caution, since it belongs here. The tribunal in Simulation is built from published awards and procedural records, which tell us about reasoning style and not about what a particular arbitrator will think at 10:00 tomorrow after a bad commute. A scorecard is not a prediction. It is a structured second opinion, available at 21:15, from something that has read the bundle.