Mercer Advocacy Program

Mercer Advocacy Program involves every aspect of what it means to be a lawyer from client counseling when someone initially comes in the door to forming agreements through mediation or through negotiation, or to trial or to appellate issues, the advocacy program spans and teaches all of those skills.

I hope that students who have gone through the Mercer Advocacy Program feel that they're ready to be practice ready. And we say around here, "The advocacy experience is really almost like getting an associate his two to three years out of law school."

You have a bunch of abstract classes and you're getting the law, but you're not really getting to apply it to real-world facts. And so Mercer, especially the advocacy program, does a good job of taking that abstract law that you're learning, and then you get to apply it to a very real feeling scenario. If you like competition, you're not scared of the competition, and you're ready to be a part of winning, you definitely want to join the advocacy program. I'm very grateful for the experience. I'm humbled by the success of this program.

When I came out of law school, I wasn't particularly well prepared to be a lawyer on day one. And then you do much of your learning from the lawyers that you interact with outside of law school. We're trying to recreate a little bit of that type of programming, that type of learning by doing inside of law school so that our students feel more confident and comfortable once they're outside of law school. We really have had a lot of success placing students in great opportunities once they've graduated from our program.

I decided to sign up for the Mercer Advocacy Program, because I knew it would be the best investment in myself and my future practice. I wanted to be a practice-ready lawyer whenever I left Mercer and I knew that joining this program was the way to do that. Mercer Advocacy Program has several teams, so we have various things to offer for different students and their personalities. We have mock trial team, moot court team, mediation teams, negotiation, arbitration and client counseling. I just think that I've become more confident in myself and believing that the things that I thought I could do, I really can do them and I am doing them.

The Mercer Advocacy Program, make sure that there's really a place for every Mercer law student, no matter if you're better suited for mediation, or suited for appeals. We try and make sure we look at what fosters your growth as a lawyer, and what fosters your readiness to be practice running. Across the board, there has been success -- success in the type of lawyer we put out, success and competitions. You know, some programs are excellent at mock or excellent at moot. Here at Mercer, we make sure we put in the time and the resources to make sure you're excellent across the board. We've been recognized through our numerous national championships. We won a national championship in client counseling in negotiation in moot court and mock trial. And that's all been within the last three years. And that's through the education that students are getting here that they're able to display across the country.

Lawyering is mostly about how hard you work, how much you care, how much effort you're willing to put in for your clients. And so I hope what our advocates have learned is that hard work portrays them. If they work hard, and they care about their clients and they want to do a good job as young advocates, they're going to be wildly successful.