When an opposing Mock Trial team used the catchphrase “Chris Gardener is a leech,” the judges looked over at Cord Wisler, the student playing Chris Gardener, and felt a strange sense of incompatibility. They couldn’t connect innocent-looking Wisler with the apparent “leech” that the other team emphasized. To this day, the phrase “Chris Gardener is a leech” is a running joke within IHS Mock Trial and a well-learned lesson that the strategy the team uses must fit what is presented at the trial competitions.
Mock Trial is a club where students are assigned court roles and partake in trial-based competitions. Primary roles are attorneys and witnesses, and additional roles include bailiffs and paralegals, who help with court order and assist attorneys, respectively. Mock Trial teams compete against each other, prosecutor versus defense, in a new case each year. The winner is determined by the judges, who are usually judges by profession.
Senior Leanne Panganiban (she/her) is co-president of Mock Trial. When she first joined the club in her freshmen year, the presidents at the time, Nadia Teng and Emily Mo, were attempting to revive the club after it stagnated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the years, Panganiban has primarily played the role of an attorney. As co-president, she supervises the attorneys and paralegals and guides students through dissecting the assigned case and roleplaying techniques.
“Our advisor has described me as a manager for roles,” Panganiban said. “I usually am the one to present the information that’s needed. I trade off with my co-president sometimes if there’s a certain part that another exec member has more interest in or has more knowledge of, then they kind of take over, but I usually do a lot of the presentations.”
Each team has three attorneys who perform a speech, the pre-trial motions, opening statement or the closing statement. These speeches are each around 5-7 minutes long, which Panganiban said makes it incredibly challenging for students to memorize.
“Those speeches were always the hardest for me,” Panganiban said. “I did the same, repeating verbal lead processes, but I also worked with hand motions and body motions so that I could cue myself to get to the next section.”
During Panganiban’s co-presidency, which she began during her junior year, she and co-President Anoushka Vyas made a few changes to the team.
“An issue that we had been hearing about the previous executive team was that it was very attorney-heavy and not super witness-heavy,” Panganiban said.
Panganiban said since the witnesses did not have as much guidance as the attorneys, they had fewer resources to prepare. Adding more witness-focused exec members allowed students who played witnesses to get more advice.
Over the past two years, the team placed top three at regionals and made it to the state competition. Now, Panganiban and the rest of the Mock Trial officer team are doing their best to achieve similar performances in future state competitions. During their most recent state competition from March 20-22, the team placed 16th out of 28 teams. This is a considerable improvement from last year, where they placed 22nd out of 26 teams.
“I am so proud of how far we’ve been able to bring Mock Trial,” Panganiban said. “In my freshman and sophomore year, state wasn’t even a concept in any of our brains. So the fact that we were not only able to qualify for state in my junior year, but win the regional competition just blew my mind. I was so impressed by how everyone just really stuck it out, even through all the challenges.”
