ANU law students prove they can hold their own in an international competition, even when the odds are against them.

Speaking in public regularly tops the list of things people would rather die than have to do. Death seems to be an overly dramatic alternative, but is an indication of the common terror that results from having to stand in front of a group of people and hold their attention while saying something cogent.

But what if the stakes were higher? What if you had to address a group of people in a language that was not your native tongue? Not only that, but you had to recall and convey a veritable War and Peace of legal facts, think on your feet in a tough competitive setting, and manage all of this while trying to beat opponents for whom the language of choice is native? How would you cope?

For one group of ANU students, the answer is: very well thanks. Five undergraduates went to Tokyo in December to compete in the sixth annual Intercollegiate Negotiation and Arbitration Competition. They were representing the nation as part of the Australian Network for Japanese Law (ANJeL) team. This includes students from the universities of Sydney and New South Wales, who competed in the English-speaking side of the competition. The ANU students made up the Japanese-speaking half of Team Australia.

Together, they faced a formidable legacy. A different Australian team in 2006, which included four ANU students in the Japanese-language component, had surprised everyone by defeating the Japanese-dominated competition, bringing the trophy back to Australia for the first time. In 2007, the new members of Team Australia didn’t think they could replicate their predecessor’s success. At best, they hoped to return from Tokyo without having disgraced themselves. Avoiding embarrassment would be success enough.

In the weeks leading up to the event, the Australian students had no idea that they would repeat the feat of 12 months earlier, once again blitzing the field in a contest that, by all expectations, should not be won by non-native Japanese speakers. Yes, the 2007 Team Australia did very well indeed. Yet if you’d asked them how they would perform in the weeks prior to departure for Japan, the reply would have been much less optimistic.

The ringleader of the competitors from ANU was team captain Adrian Wong, an Arts/Law student who had already had a taste of the competition in 2006 while on exchange at Gakushuin University in Tokyo. He competed as part of that institution’s inaugural team, and witnessed the inaugural success of Team Australia.

When he returned to Canberra the following year, Adrian was intent on leading another Australian team to compete. He initiated a course in the second semester of last year that introduced interested students to the principles of international arbitration and negotiation. Each participant was responsible for collecting materials in Japanese for study. The group would stage practice negotiations a few times each fortnight. Of those that took part in this boot camp, only a few could be selected to go to Tokyo. Twenty-three students put their names into contention, but only five would make up the Japanese-speaking half of Team Australia.

Apart from Adrian, the final line-up included Claire Hazlett, James McCombe and Kareem Moustafa. Like the team captain, were all Arts/Law students specialising in Japanese studies. The team was rounded out by Hyun-Jung Elli Kim, an Asian Studies/Arts student who was also studying Japanese and wanted to develop her skills in negotiation, reasoning that the legal competition was as good a place to start as any.

Adrian says the team was initially daunted at the prospect of following in the footsteps of the successful Australian team from the previous year. “But at the same time, having an initial mindset that we had no chance of winning was surprisingly liberating, as it allowed us to concentrate on learning through the process and doing our best, as opposed to being overly concerned with the final result or being burdened with the expectation of having to deliver a repeat victory.”

Sponsored by Sumitomo Group, White and Case law firm and the Arbitration Society of Japan, the International Negotiation and Arbitration Competition was initially designed to foster greater understanding about arbitration among Japanese university students. From a modest start involving six universities, the contest now involves 16 university teams, including the combined might of Team Australia. Each university submits at least two teams: one that competes in Japanese, the other in English.

Each team is given one half of a hypothetical international trade dilemma, which it must try and resolve in two rounds. The first part is an arbitration round, in which the judges act as arbitrators, pressuring the two teams to arrive at a resolution without the need of going to trial. In the second part of the competition, the same two teams attempt to negotiate with one another unaided to arrive at a mutually agreeable result.

In 2007, the hypothetical problem pitted two imaginary countries against one another in a case of trading gone terribly wrong. One of the countries inadvertently sold genetically modified beef to the other, breaching its strict quarantine laws. Working out where to stick the blame for this mess was only the start of the problem. The failure of the system was to be resolved when a third imaginary country agreed to buy the beef in question. Agreed, that is, until a freak lightening storm barbecued the warehouse in which the meat was being stored. For the students, this trade tragedy involved more complications and legal aspects, meaning that arriving at arbitrated and negotiated outcomes would prove very difficult.

To make things even more complicated for Team Australia, its Japanese and English speaking halves had no face-to-face contact before arriving in Tokyo a week out from the competition. For a few days the two halves got to know one another while sounding out one another’s take on the general facts. Although neither side would be in contact during the competition itself – being separated into the two language streams – being able to workshop the same problem allowed them to better prepare for the first day of competition.

Just adjusting to the pace of life in Tokyo was enough of a challenge. “You’re in Japan, and that always takes a couple of days to get over,” Claire explains. “You have to get used to the canned coffee, the crazy subways lines, having rice balls for breakfast. Then there was the realisation that we were actually there, doing the competition, and we’ve only got six, five, four, three, two days until it starts.”

“The atmosphere preparing with the other half of Team Australia was pressurised, but also very positive,” she says. “Meeting them and being able to throw ideas around with other people who were familiar with the facts really strengthened our ideas.”

Adrian says the team went through a whole gamut of emotions, ranging from “anticipation and excitement tempered by stress, restlessness, nervousness, and the occasional bout of dread and frustration”.

Day one of the competition soon dawned. Competing against a team from Waseda University, the ANU students needed to convince the arbitrators/adjudicators that they were polished operatives in a Japanese legal context. All nerves soon flew out the window as the team buckled down to the challenge of staging a legal contest in Japanese. Claire says that any arbitration requires 150 per cent concentration. Adrian says they picked up momentum as the arbitration progressed. Before anyone knew it, the session was over. The team thought they had performed well after a shaky start. They returned to their hotel to recover and prepare for the negotiation session on the following day.

“The arbitration round was mentally exhausting,” Adrian says. “Combined with a week of irregular sleeping patterns and working from morning until late into the night we were all fairly tired.” Despite their exhaustion, the students divided their preliminary work on the negotiation round into a number of shifts. Some went out to web cafes until late at night for further research, others woke in the wee small hours to finalise their case.

“We were less well prepared for the negotiation round than the arbitration, and I think this was evident in our performance,” Adrian says. “We were up against an impressive team from Doshisha University who had some excellent speakers. On our side, Elli Kim stood out as a star performer in her role of vice-president. At the end of it, I think we were all feeling exhausted, with a huge sense satisfaction that the journey was over and that we had learnt a lot along the way.”

Once the negotiation round was completed, the ANU students were relieved, hoping only to make it into the top five universities at the completion. After lunch and speeches from the officials, the winners were announced in reverse order. When the announcer listed the fifth, fourth and third placed universities, the members of Team Australia were of the opinion that they hadn’t made the cut. But then Tokyo University, supposedly the best, were called in second place. Finally, the winner was announced: Team Australia.

“I was just beside myself,” Claire says. “It would have been one of those scenes out of a movie. I was screaming, hugging my teammates, just in shock. I couldn’t believe we’d done it.”

She wasn’t alone in her disbelief. Adrian agrees that the victory took some minutes to sink in, not seeming real until the group gathered in the hallways after the ceremony to perform an “Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi!” celebratory chant.

Now, some months later, Adrian says the stress and hard work were all worthwhile. “We were faced with a steep learning curve, and in the very beginning, what seemed like an impossible task of taking an inexperienced team to compete in Japanese. But we committed ourselves to preparing for the competition throughout the semester, and with the support of Professor Kent Anderson, the Japan Centre, the ANU College of Law, ANJeL, and a lot of teamwork, we managed to bring the trophy back home for a second time.”

ANU plans to defend the trophy in December, so any interested students should contact Professor Kent Anderson: kent.anderson@anu.edu.au

Team Australia was sponsored by: ANU, Australia Japan Business Association, Australia Japan Society of NSW, Blake Dawson, Chartered Institute of Arbitrators - Australian Branch, Mr Percy Lam, Nagashima Ohno, and the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales. The team coaches were Kent Anderson, Luke Nottage and Leon Wolff

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ANU Reporter 
Autumn 2008