An Unlikely Underdog on the World Moot Stage

After winning two pre-moot competitions over two intense days in New York City in the lead-up to the Willem C. Vis Moot competition, a group of bleary-eyed Harvard Law School students tried to make their way home to Cambridge, Massachusetts, before encountering the first blizzard New York had experienced in a decade. After missing four canceled trains and switching hotels three times, Jens Hvolbøl, a Vis Moot coach, vice president of the Harvard Vis Pre-Moot competition, and the only person on the team legally allowed to drive in the United States and over 25 years old, rented a van and drove seven out of eight individuals back in time for their classes on Tuesday. (They managed to get one person on a train.) It was the latest trial for the Harvard Vis Moot team, which, despite institutional prestige as a university, largely sees itself as an underdog at the world-renowned competition where university teams wrestle with a fictitious and complex contract dispute to see who can handle the pressure and nuance of arbitration. 

Indeed, many U.S.-based law students—and practicing lawyers—likely have little context of the competition, which is widely popular in Europe and elsewhere in the world and seen as an entryway for the elite field of international commercial arbitration. Each year, the Willem C. Vis Moot competition brings more than 400 university teams from 90 jurisdictions to Vienna to arbitrate a moot case involving a contractual issue invoking the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). Problems are complicated, involving both procedural and substantive issues. The 2025 Vis Moot problem related to a breached green hydrogen plant contract, while the 2024 problem involved misdirected payments and a cyberattack. The problems can bring up issues like the disclosure of third-party funding, the use of remote hearings, multitiered arbitration clauses, and more. In its 33rd instantiation, this year’s problem involves a contract around an orchid sale and takes place under the Singapore International Arbitration Center (SIAC) rules. (The Vis rotates the rules year by year.) 

For the small and elite community of international arbitration, Vis Moot is a rite of passage. Networks are made, jobs are secured, and reputations are staked. In addition to the student competitors, the Vis brings thousands of practitioners to Vienna, acting as either coaches or mock arbitrators, or simply to engage in the celebration and friendly competition that is the event. In accordance with the Vis’s popularity, 23 years ago, they also began hosting a Vis East in Hong Kong, bringing another 150 teams to the competition.

“A weird choice”

When Hvolbøl arrived at Harvard to start his LL.M. degree in August 2025, he discovered that there was no existing Vis Moot team. A Danish-trained lawyer, Hvolbøl first competed in the Vis Moot in 2020 while completing his master’s at the University of Aarhus—and the event, albeit remote because of COVID, was formative. “I knew nothing about arbitration before then,” he says. “And I think that’s actually a very common experience for law students, because the fact that there’s a private alternative to the courts is not something I think we talk that much about during training.” After graduating and entering practice in dispute resolution in Copenhagen, Hvolbøl stayed involved, coaching teams in Aarhus and later returning to Vienna to act as an arbitrator. 

In general, “Harvard is a weird choice if you are into arbitration,” says Hvolbøl. If you’re going to study in the United States, NYU has a specialized master’s program in international arbitration, as does the University of Miami in Florida. Harvard has none, and very few classes focus on the topic. Outside of the United States, Europe and Asia offer specialized, highly competitive opportunities: the University of Geneva, the University of Vienna, the University of Stockholm, and the National University of Singapore are all known for their programs.

Moreover, at other universities, students may receive substantial course credit for participating in the competition. (The Harvard team may apply to receive minimal credit for the Vis.) Programs may be faculty-led, and coaches—of which there can be dozens—are paid akin to being a research assistant. For example, some Austrian teams spend seven months from the day the problem is released until the day they compete focused only on Vis Moot, says Hvolbøl.

I think if you ask many people at Harvard what the Vis Moot is, they might not know.

Ben Mays, LL.M. candidate, Harvard Law School

So when Hvolbøl discovered there was no Vis Moot team, he was not wholly unsurprised—but also realized his work was cut out for him. He had to be creative. HLS has a long-standing tradition of taking part in the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition, the world’s largest moot court, focused on public international law. (Vis is private.) Far more apply to Jessup than the team can accommodate, so Hvolbøl emailed the leaders to say: “When you turn folks away, send them our way.” 

“I think if you ask many people at Harvard what the Vis Moot is, they might not know,” says Ben Mays, an LL.M. student on the team who competed in 2024 as an undergrad at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, he says, there is a cache and an understanding of the time commitment if you say you’re competing in Vis, he says. “Here at Harvard, it’s very much a grassroots campaign,” he says. 

“Everything we do, we had to do ourselves,” Hvolbøl says. “We had to raise the funding ourselves. Whenever there was anything we needed assistance with from the school, we had to figure it out ourselves.” It has made their success so far, the team agrees, all the sweeter. “Everything was solely driven by us, which I think is really cool because we somehow just managed to get it all done,” he says. 

This year’s Vis Moot problem was released in October. Hvolbøl finalized the team just less than a week before—three J.D. and four LL.M. students—comparatively late for a competition where he would have preferred to hit the ground running in September. He also built up a team of four Harvard LL.M. students with Vis competition experience—David Wong from Hong Kong, Zofia Halbersztat from Poland, and Can Özcan from Turkey. Having fellow students as coaches helped contribute to a relatively “flat hierarchy,” many of the Vis Moot team members said.

Each member of the team was drawn to the competition for different reasons. Joyce Mau, an LL.M. student from Singapore who completed an undergraduate degree in law at the University of Cambridge last year, found that Vis Moot provided her an opportunity to explore “the weeds of legal arguments,” delving into “the very fine distinctions of fact and law.” This was especially important for her to find at Harvard, which has a more practice-oriented curriculum compared to Cambridge.

Because Mays made it into the round of 64 in 2024, he is barred from competing in the oral arguments this year. Still, he wanted to be part of a team and have another “shot at the memoranda,” he says, which offers the opportunity to go very deep and intense on some very discrete areas of law, in contrast to the broad sweep of the field one might have in a regular course of legal education.

Vaishnav Rajkumar, a J.D. student of Indian origin who grew up in the UAE and who did his undergraduate studies in London and has strong roots in debate, is seeking a career in public international law but sees Vis as an opportunity to become more well-rounded internationally. Rounding out the team are Isobel Houlihan, an LL.M. student from Ireland; Mark Milian, a J.D. student from New York City; Célia Aïssou, an LL.M. student from France; and Jackson Kelley, a J.D. student from Washington. 

Arguing the case

Once the problem is assigned, the Vis Moot team had roughly two months to submit a memorandum for the claimant. They receive another team’s memo and then have another month and a half to submit a memorandum for the respondent.

Writing the memoranda involved splitting the team into different documents for the merits and procedure, then coming together to read through each draft as a team in marathon editing sessions of two to three hours. “They are very, very good at making the legal issues very complicated,” Mays says. “And there’s usually a lot of ways you can approach it.” The team has only 35 pages per draft, so they have to ask questions like: “What do we want to use our space on? What do we not want to use our space on? Do we need to add something here for a reader that understands the case not as well as us to really get it, or do we not? Is this clear enough?” Mays explains.

Where the game is won is in terms of the questions that the arbitrators ask you in the heat of the moment.

Vaishnav Rajkumar, J.D. candidate, Harvard Law School

A lot of playing the Vis right is strategy, in both the memoranda and the oral arguments. “Law students are used to having to explain everything and making sure they don’t leave out any relevant arguments. Here, I very often have to tell them, ‘I don’t think the opposing party is going to dispute this at all.’ And we only have so many pages or so much time, so we really have to just cut straight to the case. What will the other party actually dispute, and what will they agree with us on?” says Hvolbøl. 

After they argue both sides in writing, then they turn to the oral phase.

In the oral arguments, they have to condense their 35-page memoranda into two 14-minute opening statements—one on procedure, one on substance. All 400 teams have spent the year delving into the same issues. They know each side backward and forward and can anticipate many of the arguments of each side. “Where the game is won is in terms of the questions that the arbitrators ask you in the heat of the moment,” Rajkumar says. “Anyone can write a script, commit it to heart, and then go and speak. But when you’re thrown off with the questions that might be asked of you—it could be good questions, it could be bad questions—it doesn’t matter; it’s how you deal with those questions that really helps you come out on top at the end of the day.”

Presentation can be more important than the substance of your arguments, Hvolbøl admits. In what could turn into five-hour-long team meetings, Vis Moot team members practice their opening statements and responses to questions. Coaches act as arbitrators and give feedback along the way, imparting some of the specific rituals of arbitration and the Vis to their mentees

Pre-moot competitions hosted by local institutions and other schools also provide opportunities for teams to test out their arguments and experiment. In addition to hosting a pre-moot at Harvard (where the Harvard team was a runner-up), the team went to pre-moot competitions in Washington, D.C. (where they also came in runner-up), at Fordham University and the ICC in New York (both of which they won), as well as at Southern Methodist University in Dallas (which they also won). While they are scored after the fact, the arbitrator tribunals end each oral argument by giving individual feedback to the participants. After the course of many sessions, competitors start to see similar faces and hear similar questions, and this helps them better strategize.

Sometimes you represent clients where you have to view things entirely differently from how it was in another case you just had.

Jens Hvolbøl, LL.M. candidate, Harvard Law School

Of the seven students on the team, four will get the opportunity to argue in Vienna—two for the respondent and two for the claimant—but everyone has to be prepared to argue both sides. To compete in the Vis Moot, you cannot have passed the bar in any country, so very few students come in with practice experience in arbitration, but the experience offers very practical skills and education in advocacy. 

“Law students are very used to applying the law to the facts and really showing that they understand all the nuances of one side, whereas here they have to represent a party and they actually have to be able to switch how they think about the issue very, very quickly,” Hvolbøl says. “I think in many ways that’s also what it feels like to be a real lawyer. Sometimes you represent clients where you have to view things entirely differently from how it was in another case you just had.”

Receiving feedback can be tough, especially when it applies to body language or oral presentation.

“I think I’m quite comfortable with getting feedback on my legal ideas, but receiving feedback on how you say certain things, it’s different,” Mau admits. Rajkumar was often told to slow down (whereas his debate experience told him to speed up), not only so that arbitrators could follow his ideas but also because the international crowd meant that many people must speak in a non-native language. Used to an English tradition of standing at a lectern, Mays found himself compensating for the awkwardness of doing the oral hearings while seated by using his hands more to gesture. He was likewise told to tone it down.  

All the team members learned to read into the practice or pre-moot arbitrators—learn what types of questions they might ask and what they might remember or not from the problem. Some arbitrators may be previous coaches and know the problems inside out. Some may have barely read it. This, Hvolbøl says, is consistent with actual arbitration practice. You have to explain both what happened and why your client is right. Other arbitrators might already have it in their head that one side’s argument doesn’t make sense—and you’re facing an uphill battle, as Rajkumar experienced at one pre-moot competition. 

The Vis is notoriously unpredictable, especially when you’re up against 400 of the best law schools in the world.

Vaishnav Rajkumar

But they’re used to uphill battles. Vis Moot has been intense, particularly for LL.M. students who spend a single year at Harvard, take a normal course load, and also must write an LL.M. thesis paper. Indeed, many of the LL.M. students on the team worked intensely over fall and January to complete their theses prior to the spring travel season of pre-moots and the actual competition. But amidst the intensity—being in five-hour meetings, enduring marathon editing sessions, and getting stuck in blizzards after many rounds of oral pleadings—what Hvolbøl hopes is that the experience has also been fun, or “fun enough that someone wants to carry it on next year.”

And as they look toward the competition in April, what are they thinking of their chances? “The Vis is notoriously unpredictable, especially when you’re up against 400 of the best law schools in the world,” says Rajkumar. They’ve had a strong pre-moot season, he says, but Vienna is different. They’re “not taking a single argument for granted.” He adds: “We’re focused, we’re prepared, and we’re ready to see how we stack up against the best on the global stage.