Legal Challenge IX : Takeaways
We are two days away from the semifinals of the Summit's moot court for this season, with the finals scheduled one week later. But for the purposes of our community, these oral hearings don't matter much, they are just 🍒 the cherry on top of the main mission: the selection of the 4 semifinalist teams who get to attend the next conference (in this case, Berlin), so that their access and integration into the industry is accelerated.
Here's my takeaways from the 9th season –
Industry-Specific Education is Still Rare
If you tried to hire a junior counsel lately, you'll probably subscribe to this notion: you get good people who come from other venues, after a few years of experience – someone worked at a licensing agency, someone handled trademark cases or patents – but it is exceedingly rare to meet a recent graduate who "gets" games industry matters.
There's a big opportunity for a decent law school to specialize in the field, and build a base. For now, we have Bucerius Law and Queen Mary's programs in Europe. For the other law schools, a specialization on video games is probably too niche, or unattainable due to lack of teacher talent, or needs more effort to introduce than the system allows.
So the answer to the question of "why most graduates are unequipped to work on a live ops game" is: "because there's no, or very little, industry-specific education out there".
International Appeal
This season's 18 registered teams had members from 🇺🇸 USA, 🇬🇧 UK, 🇨🇦 Canada, 🇧🇾 Belarus, 🇵🇱 Poland, 🇲🇾 Malaysia, 🇨🇳 China, 🇩🇪 Germany, 🇳🇿 New Zealand, 🇮🇳 India, 🇧🇷 Brazil, 🇸🇪 Sweden, 🇫🇷 France.
Clearly, video games are a topic with an international appeal – which matches the data from our own community. Studio counsels come from all over the place, whether because that matches that studio's own specific need (e.g. they need a Chinese in-house counsel) or because that's a self-made counsel who's good at games industry matters (and then it doesn't matter if you graduated in Moscow, in Manila or in Montreal).
Level Playing Field
With some caveats*, the playing field is pretty level, as evidenced by two things:
(1) the biggest country of origin for this year's teams was USA (8 out of 18), but there's not a single American-born competitor in the semifinals: being from the major games market does not lend you an automatic advantage; and
(2) in the semifinals, we have people from China, New Zealand, Germany, Brazil and India – except for Germany, hardly a group of countries that we could call privileged in the sense of access to education or exposure to games industry matters; and on the other hand, we do not see anybody from the Nordics, even though there, games industry remains very much in the spotlight.
*Caveats:
In a lot of places, hiring decisions are still made on the basis of ethnicity / nationality, and desire to avoid having to handle relocation matters; we spoke about this at the Summits in 2024 and 2025 – those are the situations where it doesn't matter how good you are, your CV simply doesn't make it into the selection.
Gender Balance
I'm happy to report that the male to female ratio among the semifinalists is 4:6 – the future of the industry's legal community, at least through this prism, looks bright and healthy.
Note that the teams were completely anonymized during the grading stage; at no point could a judge say "ah, this is a German submission", or support an all-male / an all-female team: the teams that made the cut, made it strictly on their merits alone.
Communication Skills
This is the first season where I was tracking the communication flow with the teams, to see if we could include this as a part of the overall grade next year.
The result: teams were vastly different in their comms. When I sent material and asked to confirm the receipt, some did just that – and some never emailed back; when we instructed how to name the files, and what to write in the subject of submission emails – some followed, and some came up with their own standards.
Perhaps this is about the experience of working with external people (i.e. outside of your own culture/language), or working remotely with several collaborators, or just plain work experience of being in a team and needing to sync. Perhaps this is about the attention to detail, and being able to (or unable) to read the instructions and to actually follow them.
One thing I noticed: there was a strong correlation between how good the team communicates, and how high their written submissions were graded. There hasn't been a single case where a team challenged in comms would rate high on their memoranda (so from the hiring perspective, I would look at this as a precursor of their overall legal skills).
Practical use of LLM ("AI")
We did not specifically prohibit the use of the LLMs in this moot court. A few teams told me about their experience, and at least 2 judges experimented with LLMs during their grading phase. In a nutshell: it was useless, the field of video games is so specific that you just don't have the thousands and thousands of examples in the same language and with the same terms that you will need for training the language model.
Drafting an appeal on a speeding ticket is one thing (I just received a €49 fine from Brescia for going 1.08 km/h above the allowed speed, which was over a year ago – I'm sure that LLMs would offer a dozen different options on how to weasel out of this, it's both common and straightforward). But asking LLM about a ROFO clause on a games industry contract is quite another. The blessing (and the curse) of our community is that everything is quite complicated, and also constantly evolving.
Legal Skills
The distribution of unadjusted scores this year is more or less typical for this moot: there's a leader (more on this below), and an outsider, with everyone else in-between.
The grades get closer to each other once we adjust by dropping the weakest mark of each memo ("the regatta rule" that we rely on):
The main reason why we drop the weakest mark from each set, is to prevent any team from suffering from the personal circumstances of a judge. Here's the grades from two judges from this year, who each graded 6 different memos:
48 – 54 – 56 – 60 – 82 – 92
74 – 82 – 85 – 87 – 88 – 96
To have a chance of making it into the semifinals, a team had to avoid a situation where 2 out of 3 judges would grade them low. And when 2 different judges, independently, score a memo low, it's rather unlikely to be a personal bias.
As always, memos for Respondent mostly got more favorable grades than memos for Claimant:
In the past, we discussed that it could be due to responding being easier than writing from scratch – you ride on someone else's structure already. After adjusting, though, the grades were closer to each other –
Common Issues
The most common issues for which submissions were criticized this year fall into these categories (perhaps predictably so?) –
Lacking diversity in case references
Too few cases, or cases from a single region; some relevant cases missing. One of the teams asked about the source of latest updates on game industry's legal news: to be honest, I could not offer much, just "follow leading firms and read their newsletters and populate your feed with experts sharing opinions".
Misalignment of focus
More time allocated to a secondary problem than to the core issue was a common challenge this season, as always.
Poor presentation
Extra page breaks, improper paragraph numbering, etc. – either the authors rushed, or they were blind to the low quality of how their work product was presented. I noticed that this year, judge panel was less accepting of poor presentation, the common view is that you must make your product easy to digest.
'Obviously' and 'generally'
More than a few memos this year opted for statements that were unsupported by evidence. One of the ex-judges told me about how she was once in a court and the judge said "in the brief, you write that the matter is 'obvious', but I don't get it; so, tell me, am I stupid?" – I now reference this story whenever someone puts forward a claim that doesn't have legs.
Lacking context of video games
The biggest problem, by far, was that some memos did not get the industry context right. In this competition, we don't expect the teams to be familiar with Steam's backend, or to be intimate with the terms of Apple Arcade or Sony's digital storefront – but we do expect them to understand the difference between platforms, and to differentiate a port from a standalone product. Some of the weaker memos failed to grasp the basic industry terms (which brings us back to square one: we have a massive lack of industry-specific legal education).
What's Next?
The semifinals run on March 25th; just after the midnight (Hong Kong time) we'll announce the results of the second session, and we'll know both teams that advance to the last stage. The finals are set for April 1st.
All the four semifinalist teams are invited to the 🇩🇪 Games Industry Law Summit XI in Berlin this June, and for the first time in the moot we also allow them the opportunity to opt for 🇵🇹 Summit On Tour IV in Porto in October instead.
As to Season X (2026/2027), we'll work on the case during this summer, and aim to announce it in the autumn. If you'd like to be involved, please let me know at the Berlin event in June (or in the email, once we wrap the finals next week!).
Credit Where Credit is Due
This moot court would not exist without the case committee (Katya Nemova, Darya Firsava, Felix Hilgert) and the Judge Panel, featuring 15 industry experts.
We are able to cover the costs of access to the main Summit for the four semifinalist teams thanks to the generous support of the Summit's Tier A partners: DLA Piper, Frankfurt Kurnit, MSK, Osborne Clarke & Perkins Coie.
Thank you!
– Sergei @ CO
PS If you're not reading LinkedIn much, here's a few stories we posted recently:
MTJG x Summit – collaboration announced
MTJG Cyprus re-scheduled due to bombing of Iran, Lebanon
Carob trees planted at AUB – Mediterraneo
Summit XI's Super Pass item: KPM porcelain cups