What could make all the difference in a law student’s employment potential in today’s legal market? The answer is skills training. The American Bar Association (ABA) has required that law students be better prepared for practice by implementing experiential learning requirements for law students, which they must complete before graduation. One way to fulfill this experiential requirement is through oral advocacy.

This Article exemplifies how giving law students opportunities to orally advocate will help fulfill the experiential learning requirement and produce practice-ready graduates. It will explain the reasons that oral communication is so important and will give directives on how law schools, in compliance with the ABA standards, can help achieve the goals of graduating students who are ready to begin a legal practice from the minute they receive their bar results. This Article is among the first to explore the boundaries of experiential learning under the new ABA standards. It employs an historical analysis of the classical foundations of oral advocacy in order to develop best practices for law schools in “shifting the curriculum” to both comply with the ABA standards and to help students become successful practitioners in today’s global society.

The article is about persuasion. It highlights the origins of advocacy, details how to write persuasive documents, and provides tips for presenting persuasive oral arguments. Appendices include practical checklists for editing and preparing for oral arguments, and a list of style tips. This Article is important because it gives advocates the tools they need to better prepare for making persuasive arguments, both in writing and orally, while grounding the “art of persuasion” in rhetoric and ancient-Greek philosophies and teachings.

The purpose of this article is to share the authors' experiences as educators and coaches to teams in the Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot (the 'Vis Moot' or 'Moot').

This article will focus on why out-of-classroom interaction with a law professor can be one of the most fulfilling in the law school experience.

This essay is a tribute to Calvin A. Kuenzel as part of the Calvin A. Kuenzel Memorial.