This week I was able to attend an oral argument with my mentor Mr. Young and other lawyers from his firm. This was a case I was able to study up on. In this case, a company called Lamar had a contract with Harlow, who owned an area of land where Lamar had a billboard in place. This contract included an option for Lamar to purchase an easement of the section of land their billboard was on if Harlow sold their land but gave them only 30 days to do so. After a series of different owners, Lamar would make an attempt to purchase the easement from LaCore, who now owned the land. LaCore would reject this and order Lamar off their land altogether. Lamar would then sue LaCore for breaching the contract obligation that they supposedly had among other things. After this was ruled on by summary judgment by the trial court, which means the judge came to a decision without a full trial proceeding, Lamar would appeal the case. Without going too far into the specific details about the case, this was an eye opener for me as initially in this case I saw no way where Lamar could win on appeal. However, after reading through the briefing from both sides, talking to Mr. Young about the details of the case, and hearing the oral arguments from both sides, I found that this case was much more complex than I had initially interpreted with a wide range of concepts such as tenancy at will, rule of perpetuities, and ratification that I was now able to learn about. This was a unique opportunity to firstly see what an oral argument is like and secondly to see how his team takes the work they have written in their briefs and formulates an argument to present to the court. Afterwards I got to hear the discussions they had regarding how they expect the court to rule on certain issues and what they expect future steps to be. I am excited to see how the court rules in this case and am hopeful that Mr. Young and LaCore prevail.
Goals for the coming week
This coming week I plan to shift my focus into preparing a speech and script for the Final Presentation. I want to make this a massive story of my year and journey throughout the program so that people can see how I have grown and learned throughout this program. I am very excited for the FPN.
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