Thirty students from the 3rd and 4th year of the Law Degree at CEU Cardenal Herrera University in Elche have experienced a unique professional journey by participating in the IX Cuatrecasas Legal Excellence Award, held in Alicante. This initiative, promoted by the law firm Cuatrecasas, allowed them to defend a legal opinion before a jury composed of a lawyer from the Generalitat Valenciana, a State Attorney, a notary, and a prosecutor.
The competition, which recognized the opinion drafted by Pablo and Gonzalo Ruiz Rabadán, Leandro Martínez Amargos, and Cristina Peral San Nicolás as the winner, rewards the integration of different branches of law, the quality of the written report, the rigor of the oral defense, teamwork, and the incorporation of good legal and ethical-deontological practices. The award comes with a prize of 2,500 euros.
The challenge presented to the students involved confronting a complex and multidisciplinary legal case. Teams had to analyze the facts, identify relevant issues, build a coherent argument, and defend their conclusions before an external tribunal, pushing them beyond theoretical answers.
The jury for this edition included Pedro Pacheco Guerrero, lawyer for the Generalitat Valenciana; Eduardo Muñiz Pérez, State Attorney; Gaspar Peral Bernal, notary; and Helena Gascó Enríquez, prosecutor. The diversity of profiles provided a broad perspective on the students' work, bringing the evaluation closer to how legal matters are examined in different professional fields.
According to Sergio Ruiz, a partner in Cuatrecasas's Litigation department in Alicante, the winning team stood out for its high technical level in both the oral presentation and the written report. The assessment highlights the key idea in training any jurist: knowing the law is not enough; one must be able to translate that knowledge into a defensible, understandable, and useful reasoning, requiring technique, order, prudence, synthesis skills, and mastery of legal language.
This collaboration between CEU Elche and Cuatrecasas, dating back to 2018, aims to bridge the gap between law studies and professional practice, integrating a practical vision of a jurist's activity. Previous editions have already recognized students' ability to resolve real cases before juries of professionals.
For Antonio López, coordinator of the Law Degree program at CEU UCH in Elche, the award allows students to apply their learning in an integrated manner, replicating the complexity of real-world problems that are not neatly categorized by subject and require knowledge from various legal areas.
The competition also serves as an exercise in exposure and learning under professional pressure, enabling students to see what works, what needs improvement, and the gap between knowing the law and practicing it, as highlighted by students from previous editions.
