uOttawa’s intellectual property mooting team achieved new successes for the school by taking two of the top six spots for best speaker at the Oxford International Intellectual Property Moot. Giantommaso Colaneri was the third best speaker in the entire competition, while Laurel Hogg was tied for sixth place.
Nathan Piche, the team’s other outstanding mooter, would surely have placed just as well, but was technically ineligible for a prize after mooting only one side of the argument. It is a rare feat for multiple mooters from the same school to win best speaker recognition. This is the same team that won Canada’s Harold Fox IP Moot in 2014.
The team went undefeated in the preliminary rounds, with a 4–0 record against very solid teams from Australia, India, the United Kingdom, and Canada. In the quarter-finals, the always-outstanding team from National University of Singapore advanced with a painfully decided split bench. While the process was unusual, and some observers would have reached another result, one cannot say the outcome was egregious given the calibre of Singapore’s squad.
Mooters from uOttawa have now reached at least the quarter-finals of this competition for the fourth straight year. The consistency of the teams’ results is extraordinary. A key reason is our network of IP advocacy students and alumni who support uOttawa’s IP mooters.
Special thanks go to the team’s longstanding financial sponsors and professional mentors at Ridout & Maybee. The law firm of Dimock Stratton also deserves the school’s heartfelt gratitude for covering many of the costs of participation through the Dimock Stratton Award for Mooting Excellence, which Laurel Hogg won at last year’s Fox moot. Our alumni mentors Abigail Smith and Katie Szilagyi take tremendous credit for sharing their invaluable insights and organizing countless sessions with practitioners, law clerks, and other students.
The 2016 Oxford International IP Moot team will be comprised of our 2015 Fox winners — Tracey Doyle, Laura MacDonald, and Fred Wu. Good luck to them as they prepare to further solidify uOttawa’s position among the world’s best.