THE ELS ENVIRONMENTAL NEGOTIATIONS COMPETITION FOR LAW STUDENTS-A MEANINGFUL ANNUAL TRADITION

Written by Kimberly Bick¹

The Law Student Environmental Negotiations Competition is an annual educational program offered by the CLA Environmental Law Section ("ELS") to students in law schools throughout California. The Competition provides students with the opportunity to learn and practice the skills of problem-solving, communication, collaboration, teamwork, and, ultimately, negotiation. The event is held annually in the spring, typically on a Friday, hosted by various law schools around the state. ELS held the first Environmental Negotiations Competition in 1999, in 2025, the Competition will celebrate its 23rd year (a couple of years were skipped due to COVID).

The Environmental Negotiations Competition was started as a way to give environmental law students real-world experience developing skills that mirror actual environmental lawyering. Attorneys with the section noted that many environmental lawyers spend significantly more time engaging in negotiations—for example, when developing agreements and participating in settlement conference—than they do in moot court-style appellate lawyering. The Competition provides students with the opportunity to develop these skills through hands-on experience. Although the Competition is based on hypotheticals, those fact patterns are typically loosely based on real-world disputes and therefore mirror the types of issues that students will encounter in their future practices.

Each year, attorney volunteers prepare three hypothetical problems that involve multiple stakeholders with different goals centered around a factual theme. Two of those problems are provided to the law student teams when they register and one of the problems is held back and provided to the final round participants at the negotiation just in advance of the final round. Four teams advance to the final round and are judged by actual judges who volunteer to provide feedback and select the finalists and the winners. The first two rounds of the competition are judged by volunteers, usually CLA ELS ExCom members/advisors. Each team receives a copy of the Statement of Facts for the first two rounds.