The advocacy courses conducted by the ATC aim to teach advocacy skills to lawyers at various stages of their practice, by conducting basic advocacy courses in civil and criminal matters, and advanced courses for the handling of expert witnesses and appellate advocacy.
These courses have the primary objective of improving the standards of advocacy and producing better advocates. The basic courses aim to teach advocacy to lawyers in their first to third years of practice, in order to effectively identify and correct mistakes in advocacy, and to offer guidance to new practitioners on the correct way to present their arguments in a courtroom. The expert witness handling courses are designed to teach lawyers how to conduct an expert witness consultation along with court room skills in examining expert witnesses whilst the appellate advocacy courses deal with presentation at the appellate levels.
The Bar Council Malaysia is an affiliate member of the International Advocacy Training council (“IATC”) with Brendan Siva having been appointed its Vice-Chairman. Through the Malaysian Bar’s involvement in the IATC, several of our trainers were given the honour and privilege of joining the East Malaysian faculty of advocacy trainers as well international faculties in numerous common law jurisdictions.
Our trainers are regularly invited to teach overseas by the Hong Kong Bar Association, the Law Society of Singapore, the General Council of the Bar of South Africa, the Australian Bar Association, the South Eastern Circuit Bar Mess Foundation in the United Kingdom, the Attorney General’s Chambers of Brunei Darussalam and the Director of Public Prosecutions, Fiji. In 2017, the faculty’s trainers Justice Mary Lim and Justice Vazeer Alam, Anand Ponnudurai, Andrew Chiew, Brendan Siva, Cheow Wee, Gananathan, Gopi Seshadari, Ken St James, Louis Ambrose, Low Chi Cheng, Maidzuara Mohd, Robert Low, Shaikh Saleem and Wong Keat Ching taught outside of Malaysia.
The Committee also organized its inaugural Malaysian Advocacy Trainers Conference (“MATC”) on 4 & 5 August 2017 in Penang. A total of 60 trainers took part in MATC.
Approximately 400 lawyers have been trained by our advocacy trainers in Penang, Terengganu Kota Bharu, Kuala Lumpur and Perak in 2017.