The Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba hosted the competition
The Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba has hosted a new inter-school competition aiming to hone family law negotiation skills.
The inaugural Western Canada Family Law Negotiation Competition brought together law students and coaches from the University of Alberta, the University of Calgary and the University of Saskatchewan. In teams of two, the participants competed in increasingly complex rounds of simulations of legal negotiations.
The inter-school competition was held on Mar. 6 to 7 in the offices of Fillmore Riley LLP.
“Speaking as a member of the family law bar, I would like to express how important it is to us to contribute to the training of the next generation of family law practitioners,” said Marcelin Murray, partner at Fillmore Riley and a member of the organizing committee.
Fillmore Riley said the competition sought to train the necessary negotiating skills in the midst of an access to justice “crisis” in family law and as Manitoba now requires non-adversarial dispute resolution processes take place before court intervention in some cases.
The organizers also sought to create a Western-based family law competition, given that the Walsh Family Law Moot and Negotiation Competition, previously open to Western-based law students, was restricted to Ontario-based law schools for 2020. In the future, the organizers plan to rotate the competition among different law schools in Western Canada.
Aside from Murray, the other organizers of the competition included justices, family law practitioners and teachers from the competing schools.
