Programme opportunities and events

From the first year of their degree, all our LLB and BBL students take part in mock legal proceedings such as employment tribunal hearings or civil trials. Working as part of a small team (a 'firm') to represent claimants or defendants, they cross-examine witnesses and present their case before judges.

Key roles (witnesses, barristers, solicitors) are played by students themselves, while we always look to bring in members of the profession to hear the cases; so far, this has included an employment tribunal judge, deputy district judges, and barristers and solicitors from local and regional firms - not all of whom have always come to the same conclusions!

The trials provide an important opportunity for students to put 'book-knowledge' into practice, but also highlight an important lesson for any aspiring legal professional: that the outcome of court cases is not just about rules; it is also about presentation, persuasiveness, and the people involved.

Mock trials give students the opportunity to:

• experience practical aspects of the law from the very first term of their studies;
• meet and gain feedback from legal professionals;
• develop cohesiveness in their student firms as they work collectively on a case;
• learn skills of oral argument.

The B Law Hack is a week-long opportunity for students to get together in their law firms to solve an urgent and current legal problem while engaging in a series of workshops and activities that will support them in

• getting to know one another,
• developing their interpersonal skills, and
• starting to understand other students' skill sets and ways of thinking.

Our previous hacks have focussed on replicating some of the team-building sessions that trainees attend when they join a firm. Sessions are designed to help build the cohesiveness and self-confidence of our students. The students complete the Hack on the final day of the event. This is where they hack an urgent or current legal problem such as the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire or a global challenge such as climate change.

Students, within their law firms, then identify a specific area that they perceive to be a problem and develop a solution to this issue through the creation of a new law or constitutional convention. Teams then work together to present these solutions to the whole cohort - and a winner of the hack is crowned!

IMPACT is a week-long event exclusive to second-year law and business students at Penryn. Students are given the opportunity to grow their commercial awareness and problem-solving skills by working with real businesses to develop solutions to challenges those businesses are currently facing.

During the event, students also take part in sessions led by industry experts to develop their professional skills and improve their solution, which they pitch to clients at the end of the week. As with all our programme opportunities, IMPACT can be delivered online or in person through the use of digital platforms and our virtual learning environment.

IMPACT gives our students opportunities to:

• develop interpersonal skills such as effective communication, teamwork, and leadership;
• grow their interdisciplinary knowledge across law and business through practical experiences;
• expand their connections with other students across the Law and Business programmes; and
• get feedback from business owners - and potentially see their solutions applied by businesses in the real world!

IMAGINE is an event for students in their final year of study. In it we challenge students to ‘hack’ one of the biggest challenges of them all: the environmental crisis. Designed in conjunction with The Chancery Lane Project, we enable students to imagine how law and policy could be changed to protect the environment and enable environmental recovery, in workshops and with guided reading throughout their final term with us. At the end, students bring their ideas for change to the IMAGINE conference where over the course of a few days they create viable proposals for reform, with the help of inspirational speakers and expert workshops.

IMAGINE forms part of the final year modules LAW3017C Land Law (a core module on the LLB Law with Business) and LAW3016C A Legal Response to Environmental Destruction (taken by students from across campus, including those studying on a law programme). IMAGINE will run for the first time in the academic year 2021-22.

We all advocate for positions all our lives - whether in smaller ways, such as when we seek to persuade our friends that we should go swimming today, or in larger ways, such as when we take a position on the direction that our employer's business enterprise should take. Within the legal profession, lawyers will advocate for their clients - and so on.

Whatever the setting, advocacy is a skill, but one which law schools in England tend not to teach outright. As part of our approach to remedying that, our Advocacy Week will run for the first time in January 2022. This is planned to be a week-long event for first- and second-year law and business students at Penryn, focusing on in-person (oral) advocacy and written advocacy.

Experts from the legal profession will be invited to speak with our students about what makes a successful advocate, and students will participate in a series of workshops to put advocacy techniques into practise. They will then have the opportunity to further put what they have learnt into practise as the term progresses - whether that is within seminars or in the form of a mock trial or negotiation between lawyers.