New era for UTRGV Mock Trial

Team enters court with new coaches

The UTRGV Mock Trial Competition Team will compete this academic year under the guidance of lawyers and faculty.

Attorney and part-time Lecturer Jonathon Munoz, Lecturer William Gordon and Assistant Professor Andrew Smith will guide the team. All three teach in the Political Science department.

Munoz serves as the team’s coach on courtroom procedures, legal strategies and public speaking.

Gordon, a pre-law adviser, provides the team with mentorship and guidance on legal analysis and argumentation.

Smith is the team’s adviser, oversees its operations and connects the team with opportunities within the legal community.

Before this semester, the team did not have coaches, so members coached themselves without any expert guidance.

Laura Garcia, a marketing junior and vice president of the Mock Trial Team, played a large role in getting the resources for the group.

Garcia said it is the first time the team will attend the regional tournament in three years, explaining that mock trial shut down because of COVID. Then there was a lack of funding and advisers.

“We decided to regroup,” she said. “… We decided to start reaching out to different professors, gathering more help because we realized, if we wanted to make it to regionals, we were going to need a lot more assistance.”

Garcia said thanks to the new advisers, the team has been able to gain the funds needed to attend competitions.

“Through their connections, they’ve been able to contact the university, bring in more funding that way,” she said, adding that they have also raised funds from other attorneys.

Garcia said Smith has been a great help in getting funding as well as organizing travel.

“[He is] keeping everything way more organized than we would have ever done on our own,” she said.

Aside from participating in mock trial, Garcia is an intern at a law firm thanks to the connections she made while participating on the team.

Diego Perez, an English junior and the team’s treasurer, joined the mock trial team to gain practical experience in the legal field.

Perez said the team has recently received a lot of financial support from the local legal community.

“A lot of people, a lot of attorneys and judges, have definitely supported us,” Perez said.

He said the connections have been valuable in providing not only funding but also internship opportunities.

Perez said Munoz has been instrumental in helping connect the team to other lawyers.

“He also connects us to his law firms or his buddies, you know, or his group of lawyers that he’s with,” he said. “He’s always talking to other judges, other prosecutors about us and just getting our name out.”

Perez said having an attorney-coach has been beneficial in helping the team learn how to succeed at court procedure. 

“He’s given us that knowledge and those different perspectives of what a real attorney would think and do in that situation and it overall, you know, benefited us,” he said.

Smith said the biggest challenge the team has faced is fundraising.

“Reaching out to law firms, reaching out to judges who are willing to donate–that’s been the hardest part,” he said. “Now, it’s been successful so far, but it’s still the hardest part, getting the money.”

To raise funds, Smith said the team reached out to the Political Science Department, the College of Liberal Arts, the Student Government Association, partnered with private companies and created a GoFundMe page that was shared within the local legal community.

He hopes to win tournaments and teach members trial procedure. 

“I want them to learn about trial advocacy,” Smith said. “I want them to learn, you know, this is what a good opening and closing statement in a trial looks like. This is how you decipher depositions and affidavits to find the key points that you need to hammer home when you’re examining or cross-examining a witness.”

Smith hopes to raise the profile of the Rio Grande Valley.

“We’re going up against our peer institutions such as Texas and A&M and so forth, but we’re also going up against, certainly at regionals, we’d be going up against the Harvards and the Yales, the Stanfords the Georgetowns, the elite schools, and you know, we’re this little school in the lower Rio Grande Valley that the only time anyone ever bothers to pay attention to us is when there is, or people think there is, problems with immigration security,” he said. “Nobody otherwise gives a wit. So, getting the region’s name out there, getting our name out there, through competition, hopefully through winning, that’s the secondary goal.”

The team is set to attend the invitational competition hosted by Texas Christian University in late October.

Students interested in joining Mock Trial can try out for a spot on the competitive team or attend meetings to learn legal procedure. For more information, students are invited to join chat.whatsapp.com.