Notice of Appeal - High School Mock Trial Judges Needed

Below is a message from long-time LCBA member, Ted Kurt. Please direct all of your questions per the announcement:

The following notice is an appeal for help, so I suppose it constitutes a Notice of Appeal.

Retired Perrysburg Judge Dwight Osterud, Mary Sue Barone, and I are coaches for the Perrysburg High School Mock Trial program. The Ohio program is sponsored by the Ohio Center for Law-Related Education - OCLRE. This year the OCLRE is having trouble scheduling district, regional, and statewide competitions due to a shortage of volunteers to judge the competitions (which will be virtual). Judge Osterud received a request for help from OCLRE, which is pasted below.

Please consider helping out. If you can, or if you need additional information, please contact Danielle Wilmot, OCLRE Program Coordinator, at dwilmot@oclre.org or 614-485-3507.

Tell her Judge O sent you.

Thanks.

Ted Kurt

Lawyer

tedkurt@tedkurt.com

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We still need judges for the competition! Thank you to everyone who has shared our volunteer message so far. We are slowly increasing our judge numbers, but we still have a long way to go.

Given the dire need for volunteers, we have relaxed the judge requirements for this year. Teachers and college students with significant mock trial experience are now permitted to judge.

Team advisors and legal advisors may judge the competition on any day their team is not scheduled to compete. We also welcome any college students who previously participated in high school mock trial or collegiate mock trial.

If we cannot recruit enough judges, we are looking at the following potential changes:

Teams may be moved from their competition date to a date/time where we have more volunteers.

Trials may proceed with a single judge. This judge would preside over the trial and the trial would be recorded for two additional volunteers to review and evaluate at a later time.

We may need to limit schools to a single team. Schools with multiple teams would need to hold an inter-school scrimmage to decide on a single team to represent them at competition.

This would be done on a sliding scale with third and fourth teams being removed first. Worst case scenario would be limiting each school to only one team.

We recognize that this is not an ideal situation, but we are doing everything in our power to make the competition possible. We appreciate your continued support and patience during this time.