South Texas College of Law Houston’s Dispute Resolution (DR) Board recently hosted the inaugural Houston Area Tri-Law Negotiation Competition. This student-run competition is a collaboration between the three law schools in Houston – South Texas Law, Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law, and the University of Houston Law Center.
Because it was the first time the contest was held, the board kept the competition small, capping it at 12 students. Two teams from each school participated. The purpose of this competition was to provide students with an opportunity to hone their negotiation skills with students they don’t know.
“At STCL Houston, an added goal is to provide students that want to compete on our DR teams an opportunity to gain additional practice in advance of tryouts the following year,” said Prof. Debra Berman, director of the law school’s Frank Evans Center for Dispute Resolution. “We selected our teams in advance of the competition from a tryout pool of 24 students who had expressed interest in DR competitions or were on a sparring team already.”During the competition, students competed in three preliminary rounds that took place in a round-robin tournament structure. The competition’s preliminary rounds occurred via Zoom, and the final rounds took place in person at South Texas Law. The winning team was from the UH Law Center.
To further the collaboration, each of the three law schools was responsible for providing judges and each competition room had one judge from each school, making sure that the feedback was diverse, and the scoring was fair and unbiased.
Moving forward, the vision is for each school to take turns hosting the annual contest.
“The competition was a huge success,” said Berman. “We look forward to collaborating with our neighboring schools to host this competition next year.”
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