Running a session

Two doors into the room

From the case page:

• Start sparring — the quick start. Pick the proceeding, argue now, against the default scenario. Someone who wants to argue right now should not have to walk through a studio to say “the usual”.
• Configure & start — the studio, for when who you face matters: opposing counsel’s experience and appetite for objecting, the bench’s temperament and engagement, the witness’s demeanour, curveballs, the podium clock. Who you face covers every setting and the four presets.

Difficulty is declared before the session and locked once it starts. What you configured is what the session stores, so a score is always attributable to a room you can reconstruct.

What the proceeding decides

The proceeding you choose is not a label — it decides which objections can be raised at all. Hearsay needs a witness being examined; an oral argument has none, so it cannot fire there. In an examination, the room seats a witness who answers only from the record. In a forum where the catalogue says the bench sits as a panel, a panel is seated, each seat speaking for itself.

Where the catalogue says a forum sits as a panel, the room seats the whole bench — each seat with its own voice, addressed the way that forum addresses it, and the transcript records which seat spoke.

In the lawyer-free forums — small claims, conciliation — you argue as a party, not as counsel, and the room reflects it in its labels and its badges: no opposing counsel objecting, because no lawyer may appear. In conciliation a settlement is a success, graded on its own rubric — grasp of the dispute, and whether you got to an agreement — because the hearing rubric would mark down the outcome the forum exists to produce.

Which side of that line a session was on is frozen onto it, so a replay months later reads back the room you actually argued in.

Objections, live

When something objectionable leaves your mouth, opposing counsel may interrupt — mid-sentence, the way it happens. The bench rules before you continue: sustained, and the line is struck from the record; overruled, and you carry on. Most of the time nothing fires, because nothing should — the room is not trying to catch you out, it is trying to be a courtroom.

You cannot cut opposing counsel off, and interrupting the judge is noted for what it is.

The clock, if you set one

The podium clock runs the way argument time actually runs — it counts your argument, not the objections against you. Time spent on somebody else’s objection is not your time.

Ending

End the session yourself when the argument is done. The judge composes and speaks the closing ruling before the room releases you — then the scorecard is written, and everything in after a session becomes available. A session you abandon early keeps its transcript but may have nothing to score, and the scorecard page will say so rather than invent a number.