Client Counseling and Negotiation Competitions Sharpen Students’ Advocacy Skills
Written By Mike Weatherford
What happens when a bus driver claims he was fired for failing a drug test—after unknowingly using a THC-laced ointment he bought online?
Was it a case for product liability? A worker’s compensation claim? Or just an unfortunate misunderstanding?
These were the kinds of questions Boyd Law students Cianne Wallin and Zack Carlow had to unpack—quickly—in front of judges during the American Bar Association (ABA) Regional Client Counseling Competition held in Houston this past February. The Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution helps to sponsor Boyd student participation in ABA competitions that provide valuable hands-on learning.
Luckily, the bus driver wasn’t real.
“He was a role player,” Wallin explains. “The pretend clients have all this in their script, and we’re just trying to pull these things out.” That’s the core of the challenge: not just identifying the legal issues, but also helping the client understand their options. “You do have a case,” she says, “but here are the other options for you.”
Wallin and Carlow didn’t win the regional competition—unlike their first-place finish as 1Ls in a 2023 on-campus round—but the experience proved transformative.
“Before law school I wanted to go into transactional work,” says Carlow. “But winning that competition as a 1L empowered me to want to work with clients. It made me more confident to pursue the oral-advocacy side of legal work, not just the paperwork.”
Wallin, who entered law school after raising children and helping manage her husband’s medical practice, also originally had transactional goals, with an interest in small business and mergers and acquisitions work. But the client counseling format helped her realize something else: “Hey, I’m pretty good at working with people.”
That insight paid off during a summer internship with a prosecutor’s office in Southern Utah, where she spoke with victims of serious crimes. “The client counseling experience really helped me feel like I know how to help people trust me with the information they need to tell me,” she says.
Meanwhile, students Sonny DeFreitas and Laura Lomeli explored a different skill set in the ABA Negotiation Competition held online last November. No actors this time—just 50 minutes to negotiate a mutually beneficial agreement with another team, each working from a combination of shared and confidential information.
“Each side had confidential information that the other side did not know,” explains DeFreitas. “Based on the mutual fact sheet, we could kind of see what the other side should or could want.”
Despite facing internet connection issues in the first round, the Boyd Law team earned the vote of one of the three judges in the second round. More importantly, they walked away with a clearer understanding of how to negotiate effectively and ethically.
“I learned a lot about negotiating. Trying to get a win-win for your client, and also not spend all the money it takes to pursue litigation,” says DeFreitas. “It made me think more about what the other side is thinking, and what they want out of the case.”
He adds, “You can’t guarantee happiness. But satisfaction? Probably you could.”