By Mr. Jonathan Tan, Lecturer, Faculty of Law
On 23 and 24 September 2022, SEGi College Sarawak’s Advocacy and Moot Club (SAMC), a student club under the umbrella of the Faculty of Law, organised a fun-through-learning interactive workshop called ‘Basic Principles of Court Proceedings’.
This two-day team-building workshop, which was packed with various team activities, including team Kahoot quizzes and fate-card selection for every team (similar to Monopoly fate cards but with law terminologies as headings), was attended by various batches of SEGi law students from the Diploma in Law and University of London LLB programmes.
The participants got the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of the workflow of a court case in litigation and what needs to be observed throughout, ranging from preparation of necessary preliminary cause papers, pre-trial conference, opening speech, full-trial process, closing speech and case submission.
As learning the proceedings of a case of the first instance is vital as required by the legal industry, the participants also got valuable industrial insights on day-to-day court proceedings from a fellow committee of the Advocates Association of Sarawak (AAS), Alan Bong, who is also heading the Young Lawyers and Sports sub-committee for the Kuching Division of the AAS.
The post-event feedback given by Alan to the speaker of this workshop, Jonathan Tan, a law lecturer and the primary advisor of SAMC, was very positive as the focus of this workshop was on the case of the first instance, covering full-trial simulation exercises of a simulated original jurisdiction of a court, which is unlike conventional mooting where mooting simulates cases on appeal. Indeed, SAMC is privileged to have had Alan as the guest judge and co-speaker for this workshop.
This team-building workshop was wrapped up with a prize-giving ceremony, including the giving of fantastic lucky-draw prizes (some of which were sponsored by Edward Low of SEGi Group of Colleges and Jonathan Tan, the main advisor of SAMC), appreciation tokens for the invited guest judge and co-speaker, Alan Bong, a post-workshop appreciation speech by the SAMC president, Emily Elaine Ngui, and a group photography session.
This workshop was another successful project by SAMC, all thanks to the organising committee (Emily Elaine Ngui, Abu Daniel, Phoebe Sangan Sia, Nurul Iffah and Christina Chew) and co-advisor, Hetty Susilawati, and the coordination by the emcee, Phoebe Sangan Sía.
SEGi College Sarawak and SAMC were truly honoured and blessed to be able to organise Season 2 of this workshop in person on campus this year.
