Last week, on 9-12 of April, Kamilė Baranauskaitė and Virginija Baranauskaitė, students of the Faculty of Law of Vilnius University, together with the team’s mentor, doctoral student and lecturer Goda Strikaite-Latušinskaja, visited Glasgow, Scotland, where the international Brown Mosten Client Consultancy Competition took place, which brought together teams from more than 20 different countries.
“The most memorable part of the event was the environment of the University of Glasgow, which was reminiscent of the movies, and the unexpected twists and turns of the consultation – in the first round, I brought a purchase contract that I had to analyse during the consultation itself. And in the second round, the arrival of a businessman rather than a consumer at a consumer rights consultation, where all the storylines were consumer-oriented, also turned all the prepared material upside down”, say Virginija and Kamilė Baranauskaitė.
“During the competition, we really learned how to adapt to unexpected situations, different client moods, improved our professional English language skills and met law students from all over the world,” the students say.
The ICCC is an annual event that brings together law students from all over the world to showcase and improve their client counselling skills (soft skills). The competition is distinctive because it gives students the opportunity to gain practical experience in developing their ability to communicate effectively with clients and to solve real-life problems in legal practice.
The aim of the competition is to build a rapport with the client during the first interview, to identify the client’s legal problems and to propose solutions to these problems. This year’s theme was focused on consumer disputes, where at each stage of the competition we dealt with seemingly ordinary consumer problems, but each situation had its own unique aspects, requiring not only legal knowledge, but also the ability to adapt to the client’s specific needs and emotions. Thus, the contestants had to combine not only legal reasoning but also the emotional needs of the client in order to come up with the best solution.
In addition, another distinct advantage was the opportunity to interact and exchange ideas with students, lawyers and professionals from different countries around the world. This experience not only enriched the participants’ legal knowledge of what other countries’ legal systems look like and how they work, but also gave them the opportunity to create lasting memories and valuable friendships.