Team wins first place at Transactional Law Competition
(from left) Jordan Giles, Hannah Buzolits, and Allison Kruschke.
Tariq Akeel and Meg Bauer joined forces for the Jaffe Transactional Law Competition and successfully combined their unique strengths to receive first place as buyer’s counsel.
In MSU Law’s first appearance at the competition hosted by Wayne State University Law School and the firm of Jaffe Raitt Heuer and Weiss, the team was faced with the additional challenge of competing virtually due to COVID-19 health and safety advisories.
While the idea of a virtual competition caused initial concern for the team of Akeel and Bauer, they adapted quickly and, to their surprise, the format worked better than anticipated.
“I was pretty apprehensive about negotiating virtually because I thought it would hamstring us: being in the room, being able to observe body language, being able to control how you position the room or where you position yourself in the room, and being able to read each other and play off each other. I was pretty anxious about how we were going to do that, but I thought it worked really well, for the most part,” Bauer explained. “It was harder to convey body language, but it could still be done.”
The competition was carried out via a Zoom video conference with both teams representing the buyer’s and seller’s counsel able to see and converse with one another. Meanwhile, the judges were present, but they were muted and without video.
“The competition’s goal was to emulate the real-world experience, which is that a client would come into your office and say ‘I’m interested in this sale,’ ask you to write up a letter of intent, you’d draft that letter and then send it over to the other side,” Bauer said. “They look at that letter and make modifications to look the way they want and then they send it back to you to negotiate the terms.”
As a new team competing together for the first time, Akeel, a dual JD-MBA student, and Bauer navigated the competition by relying on, and learning from, each other’s individual skills.
“We were a good team together. We played off each other’s strengths. Meg’s really good at negotiation tactics and connecting with people and I understand a lot of the business aspects of the transaction and the structure, and she does as well, but our personalities kind of balance each other,” Akeel said. “At different times during the negotiations, I would lean on her or she would lean on me, and it really played well together.”
With all the sudden change and adjustments, Akeel and Bauer maneuvered the situation with characteristic calm, and they’re grateful for the experience and its unexpected lessons.
“Honestly, one of the biggest things that I took out of this is to have a little faith in myself. I had absolute faith in Tariq, but it was a good reminder that, yeah, we do know how to do this,” Bauer said. “We can do this pretty well, actually. I’ll remember that.”
Team takes second at virtual Patent Drafting Competition
Brianna Loder, George Sang and Lawrence Arsanos
Brianna Loder, George Sang and Lawrence Arsanos competed together for the first time as a team at the Midwest Regional for the National Patent Application Drafting Competition on March 14.
Months of preparation led up to the event but just a few days shy of the competition in Detroit, everything changed.
Amidst health concerns and travel restrictions caused by COVID-19, the competition was moved online, and the team was forced to adapt.
Navigating a virtual competition with just days to prepare proved to be a challenge but the team wasn’t alone in taking it on. With support from MSU Law, including the team’s faculty advisor, Professor Jeff Carter-Johnson; their MSU Law alum coaches, Caitlyn Silverblatt and Cassandra Green; and the IT staff, the team was set up with a conference room in the law building and all the resources they needed to be able to compete.
Despite best efforts, technical difficulties were not unexpected. During their first-round presentation, the team was unable to see the judges on the other end, but they kept going.
“One of the biggest adaptations was having to sit down and talk to a phone, especially in the first round because we didn’t have the judges on screen. I looked at the phone like it was a person,” Arsanos explained.
“We had our coach in the background saying, ‘Lawrence, look up, look up.’ I had to remember that I had to stare into the camera and look at them.”
Arsanos was the only member of the team who had previously competed at the event. “The competition tries to keep itself as close to how a patent prosecution would go,” he explained. “We start with a search, finding pieces of prior art, and based on what we can find, we narrow in on what we couldn’t find in our searches and build around that as our point of novelty and start drafting around that with some feedback from our coaches.”
While the competition may not have been in the format they expected and prepared for, the students, all of whom hope to work in patent prosecution beyond law school, said the experience taught them a lot about the patent process, and the unprecedented circumstances also taught them about who they are as professionals.
“It’s very practical hands-on knowledge that you don’t necessarily get at this point in your career,” Loder said. “Depending on where you work, you may not get to work with an invention right from the start and mold the application the way you want it to be, so it’s really great to be able to go to an employer and say we worked as a team, did this application, and were successful.”
“It helped show us we’re adaptive,” Arsanos added.
At the end of the day, the team was awarded second place at the Midwest Regional, impressing the judges with prior art they found to support their presentation. While unable to take a team-winning photo with their trophy at this time, the 3L students who will graduate this year have agreed that they will return to the Law College to share the moment together one day.
