Another successful participation in the 31st Vis Moot in Vienna this year!
Team Saarland with its members Laurenz Beckmann, Ruben Debuf, Nicolas Graf, Gabriel Haas, Ata Türkfiliz and Elene Turmanidze received awards for their written work at the 31st Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot, the unofficial world championship competition of law faculties in international commercial law, which ended in Vienna on 28 March 2024 after six months of intensive work. The team was supervised by Prof. em. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult Helmut Rüßmann, with the support of coaches Elinam De Souza (Europa-Institut alumna and PhD candidate) and Eva Wingler (senior government official in the Hessian financial administration).
This year's moot was dedicated to the memory of Professor Eric E. Bergsten, who founded the Vis Moot in 1993. The Moot has since become the largest competition in the field of international business law worldwide and attracts teams from all over the world to compete against each other every year.
The Vis Moot dealt with the modern issue of cybersecurity while simultaneously allowing teams to become familiar with the recently-adopted 2021 International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) Arbitration Rules, the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) and the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
On the merits of the case, the students had to determine whether a payment of 38,4 million dollars made by the Respondent to a cyberattacker could be deemed as valid payment for the Claimant’s radar sensors under the CISG. This was especially given that the phishing email which prompted the Respondent to pay to the cyberattacker’s bank details contained several “red flags” and errors, which are characteristic of such cyberattacks. On procedure, teams dealt with the question of whether the tribunal could authorize an additional claim of the Claimant to the pending proceeding, or, in the alternative, consolidate the two claims into one proceeding. Tackling these issues from both the perspective of Claimant and Respondent, the team engaged in profound discussions while training their writing and analytical skills.
During the oral phase of the competition between February and March 2024, the team transformed its written arguments into oral arguments. The team travelled to the Gleiss Lutz law firm in Stuttgart, to the Madrid Pre-Moot in Spain, to the law firms Osborne Clarke and DLA Piper in Cologne, to the White & Case Pre-Moot in Brussels and to the ICC Pre-Moot in Paris. Through these Pre-Moots, the team learned how to extract the best arguments for a client and present them in a limited amount of time. The team also received several sessions of oral advocacy training from public speaking coach and expert John Faulk, founder of RemTene Mooting.
In March, 373 teams from universities stemming from 89 jurisdictions around the world converged in Vienna to present their oral arguments before 1,100 arbitrators from varying backgrounds and areas of practice. The team of Saarland University took part in four general rounds against universities from the United States and Poland.
At the end of an eventful week in Vienna, the team received two awards in the form of honorable mentions for its written submissions on the side of both Claimant and Respondent. This is an incredible achievement as only 14 of the 373 participants were able to win awards for both submitted memoranda. The team is proud of this achievement and looks forward to the 32nd edition of the Vis Moot.
Students interested in participating in the next edition of the Vis Moot are invited to send an email to vismootsaarland(at)europainstitut.de.
More information on the Vis Moot can be found on their website https://www.vismoot.org/.
Report by Elinam De Souza