Mar 10, 2025

🏆 LC VIII – results & reflections

Good morning, people! I'm here to report on the results of our little moot court (well, not so little anymore!) – and to announce the 4 teams that made it to the semifinals, and thus secured their admission to Summit X in Vilnius.

Fast Track to the Games Industry

The concept of Legal Challenge, the industry-focused moot court that we run for the 8th time this year, is to provide legal talent from anywhere in the world with an accessible fast track route to the games industry.

Our cases require understanding of what video games are (something which a firm, or a studio, will expect of their counsels).
Our judges are all practicing lawyers with experience in the games industry (similar to whom the young talent will typically report to).
Our process tests not only the academic knowledge, but also the coordination and the communication skills (a crucial skillset for working with games).
The participation has a low entry barrier (€50 per team), while the grading process is completely anonymized, with judges completely unaware of the identities of the authors of the submissions.

We consider these 3 outcomes to be beneficial for the competitors:

A confirmation of your strong skills, providing more confidence and creating opportunities to join the industry (semifinalists).
An understanding that you need more work to match the demands of our industry. This is especially true for the teams that have not competed on the global scale before: you may be "the" games lawyer in your group, but this may still be below the level that the studios are hiring at.
A realization that practicing law in the area of video games is not what you expected: perhaps too complex, perhaps requiring more education; this may lead to either a decision to switch areas, or to doubling down on the studies.

After 8 years of running the court, we have more than 10 former LC semifinalists working at a number of law firms and games studios, and we're very happy to have played a small part in their path to become a part of the industry.

A Record-Breaking Year

Season 8 of Legal Challenge set a new record for participation:

this is the first time when we wrote a proper story
the case files have been downloaded over 300 times (!)
22 teams with lawyers from 22 different countries registered to compete

This is also the first year when we actively suggested mentors, and welcomed association of teams with specific schools or firms (here's the list), to stimulate the industry connections as well as to encourage schools and firms to provide more support to the competitors.

21 team completed the on-boarding process
20 teams submitted for Claimant
19 teams submitted for Respondent

All in all, this has been the most representative season for Legal Challenge. We are very happy that – thanks to you, dear community! – we are able to reach young talent all over the globe.

Who Makes It Possible?

This moot court is driven by the passion of people involved, and by the community support. We're not a university with an endowment, and we're not a multinational corporation with a need to greenwash our sins: we're just a bunch of industry lawyers who try to help the next generation of brilliant lawyers to join our industry.

One crucial part is the Judge Panel. Each judge grades 8 memos across 5 categories, coordinating their approach with the rest of the panel – not a small feat, by any means! Legal Challenge VIII is privilege to have these fine lawyers serve on its judge panel:

🇿🇦 Pieter Koornhof (the Presiding Judge), 🇩🇪 Felix Hilgert, 🇮🇳 Sneha Jain, 🇸🇬 Meryl Koh 许君宁, and 🇵🇱 Anna Kruzsewska;

🇨🇳 🇺🇸 Yue Lu 卢月, 🇦🇺 Michael Boughey, 🇨🇾 Aleksandra Mirgorodskaia, 🇨🇾 George Mountis, and 🇲🇽 Efraín Olmedo;

🇬🇧 Kostya Lobov, 🇧🇷 Vanessa Pereja Lerner, 🇨🇳 Tracey Tang 汤擎, 🇬🇧 Xuyang Zhu, and 🇺🇸 Karin Pagnanelli.

The other crucial part is the Case Committee: the people who prepare and iterate the case, and its evidence. All the credit for this season's case belongs to the 2 people on the left (the guy on the right just likes to send hundreds of emails):

Finally, we would not be able to set aside close to €19.200 for the complimentary Summit passes to the 4 semifinalist teams without the generous support of our conference's top-tier sponsors:

Thank you!

Analytics

As Micha Katz of Aream & Co. likes to say, the more data points your studio has – the easier the discussion of a possible deal. By this metric, Legal Challenge made a significant step forward: this is the first time when we digitized grading, and required each judge to add comments for each of the grades, so that the teams can get more granularity in the feedback; and an additional review, if necessary, can have more insight into "why this?" for the grades being debated.

Here's the spread of the grades this year –

This season set the record for both the lowest, and the highest grade issued. Orange marks the grades for the memoranda for Claimant, blue – for Respondent. Typical of this moot court, most teams (though not all) do better when responding.

And here's the overall results (each memo receives 3 grades for C and 3 for R; we drop the lowest, and arrive at "C-adjusted" and "R-adjusted", which together are called "T-Adjusted") –

As you can see, we have 1 extremely strong team, scoring 382/400; and 2 runners-up, with 368/400 and 367/400. As to the 4th place, we had 5 teams that were within 4 points of each other, including two that are tied-in. We had to get an extra judge involved, to confirm that the grades are balanced. Despite adjustment for two grades, the ranking did not change, and thus the team with 346/400 confirmed its 4th place.

This Year's Semifinalists

We're excited to confirm that the following 4 teams qualified to the semifinals, listed here in the alphabetical order:

The work of the mentors – as well as the support of the schools (Bucerius Law School) and the law firms (Chrysostomides, Pryor Cashman and Sairkishna & Associates – is commendable!

What's Next?

The 4 teams above will now face each other in the oral pleadings, scheduled for March 25-26 (the semifinals) and March 27 (the finals).

If you know a law school that has a games industry-focused legal track and whose teams regularly participate in the moot court competitions, please send the our way – we'll be happy to add them to the list that we started to put together here.

And if you're one of the lawyers in our community with industry experience and a passion for moot courts – please drop us a line; we aim to complete the Judge Panel for Season 9 by the end of April.

Finally, you can follow the results of the semifinals and the finals here:

In just two weeks – a few days before 🇮🇹 Summit On Tour III kicks off in Rome – we will know, which team that takes the main prize!!

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// Sergei at Charlie Oscar