I am on a team of three people for a moot court competition in law school. It requires that we collectively write an appellate brief, a persuasive essay about why we should have won at the trial level. Naturally, we divided the issues amongst the three of us and scheduled a date to compile a draft. We met about a week ago and gave feedback to each other.
First, the entire brief is due in 4 days, and the she is not done with the revisions to her draft (which is preventing us from finishing other sections of the brief like the summary of the arguments). But that isn’t the most difficult part. Today, she called me to ask a simple question, but I kept her on the phone because I wanted to discuss her section with her. It feels bad to say it, but her work is subpar at best. Some of the paragraphs are way off or simply don’t make sense. I tried to talk through the arguments she is trying to make, but it’s like we are talking past each other. She doesn’t want to get to the bottom of the arguments; she typically says something like she’ll look at it more later. I also suggested we move one of the arguments to a different section because it makes more sense for them to be combined, but she was adamant she had them the way they should be. Throughout this process I’ve attempted to give hints about what she should be arguing and where to look to support those arguments, but she opposes almost every suggestion I make.
It doesn’t feel like she isn’t putting in effort; she genuinely thinks she is doing a solid job. And it isn’t that I’m too afraid to say it needs work. It’s that she refuses to hear me out or accept assistance. I have no problems with the other teammate; we’ve worked together really well. Any suggestions on what I should do? The other teammate is very concerned about her performance, and he has suggested we speak with our supervising professor. We three meet in person this week to review our progress.
tl;dr: My writing teammate is not doing a good job and opposes any feedback I provide. I don’t know how to get through to her.
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