A guide to drafting memorials for moot court competitions

If you are a law student, the odds are that you have already been told of the benefits of participating in moot court competitions. Moot court competitions allow law students to build at least a few of the skills desperately needed in the ultra-competitive legal sector. They allow mistakes without the fear of career-crushing consequences flowing from them. And they are simple too.

The claimant/applicant argues for a fixed time before a panel of judges, and the defendant follows. The claimant attacks again with rebuttals, which the defendant must dismantle in surrebuttals. The oral rounds last for about two to three days, ending with the most skilled (or the most favoured – if you know, you know) taking their trophies home.

Tap Here to Add The Daily Star As A Trusted Source

But drafting the written submissions for these competitions—the memorials—often amounts to entire months of gruelling effort. Moot memorials are key; their depth is directly causative of the depth of your legal pleadings in the oral rounds, and in many cases, they decide whether you even get to appear for them or not. And after that, who you face in your preliminaries is determined based on their scores.

Every mooter has their own method. I’ll share mine.

Read the facts carefully

Moot facts are expertly drafted and hide within plain sight points that can decisively be exploited by participants playing either side of the case. It is standard procedure to read the facts multiple times before commencing with your legal research and drafting processes, and I suggest referring back to them every now and then as you study up the law, construct your arguments and type them out.

In mooting, just as in legal practice, the interpretation of a single word or phrase can change outcomes in or against your favour. You, therefore, have to mark out words and phrases of the heaviest consequence and know the entirety of the context of their usage. To do well, you need both knowledge and instinct, both of which you develop with intensive legal research.

Research smartly, but don’t cut corners

While AI has made legal research significantly easier, the more I use these tools – even the premium, paid versions – the more I grow to appreciate our human intellect. Personally, going to the trouble of reading the relevant portions of Judgements and Arbitral Awards paragraph by paragraph has been far more rewarding than having AI make arguments for me.

Sifting through the wealth of judicial reasoning and decision-making not only helps develop your own legal mind but also gives you lines of thought that you can import and tailor to fit your case by analogy and then use to persuade the Bench.

Draft the argument’s architecture like it is art

In these competitions, from within the same factual and legal parameters, we have to construct legal pleadings supporting outcomes that are diametrically and irreconcilably opposed, and executing that successfully is nothing short of art. Throughout the time I worked on my last moot memorials, my mind was stuck on Michael Jackson’s legendary Motown 25 Billie Jean performance (1983), having seen his biopic just a week or two before. The 2026 FIFA World Cup had started by then, and an argument landing the way I wanted it to was the spiritual equivalent of the ball finding the back of the net.

This isn’t actually relevant to the logical process of constructing arguments, but consciously and subconsciously, that is the sort of feeling I chase as I draft. You need to channel your passion and innate creativity to craft the individual puzzle pieces of your argument, and then comes the time to grit your teeth and dig in patiently as you fit the individual pieces together step by step to produce the biased picture you want to show. For your memorials to persuade anyone else, they must first persuade you, and for that, you need to keep prodding, polishing and retro-fitting them till they feel unyielding and devastating to opposition.

A good argument has a good punch to it, and you can get that sort of thing by giving it a self-reinforcing architecture, beginning from, leading to and concluding in the same strand of coherent logical advocacy – an oppressive spiral that gives your opponents no room to breathe. Remember, arguments that you feel are art will be something for judges to remember. And you will be rewarded so long as you don’t get carried away and make fatal flaws.

Be a team player

Feel free to disregard this if you want to be the sole person working on memorials in your team, but be warned: mooting is a team-based activity, and the more efficiently you divide up the work, the better you are likely to do.

Bearing in mind that there will always be differences in opinion, experience and ability, try your best to help your teammates, and let them help you as well. After compiling everyone’s work together into the two memorials, it’s definitely a good idea to check how well they fit together. And it’s definitely bad to start a competition amongst yourselves before the actual one starts.

Beware of technical errors

Rules and technical requirements relating to memorials vary for each competition. Different competitions specify different font styles and sizes, different citation styles for footnotes, different word/page limits, and different line and paragraph spacing requirements. Adhering to these perfectly is a prerequisite for success at these competitions, and non-compliance can be penalised harshly.

In fact, the last three to four days before the deadline should exclusively be devoted to checking for such violations, fitting the word or page limit, fixing any errors in the footnotes and building your table of contents and index of authorities, and making sure whether the page numbers there really correspond to the content of the legal pleadings.

If, like me, you prefer working on Google Docs due to it allowing all team members to contribute simultaneously, the last phase of work will likely be pure agony. Submissions generally have to be in MS Word docx format, and downloading a Google Docs file and opening it on MS Word always messes up the page numbers. I have done around seven moots till now, and it is always at this phase that I end up deciding to hang up my boots once and for all. But the thrill of the argument proves to be too great a temptation, and somehow, I end up coming back for more.

Mooting is a terrible ECA. Nayeem advises that you never ever go near it. Visit him for more good advice at the Supreme Court (Moot Court Division), where he sometimes gets lost.