Budding courtroom litigators will exercise their skills when the Butler County Bar Association hosts this year's district and regional competitions for the Pennsylvania Bar Association Mock Trial Championships.

The district competitions will begin tomorrow at the Butler County Courthouse with a Meet the Judges reception at 5:45 p.m. Butler County Common Pleas Judge Marilyn J. Horan is heading the reception, which will involve a dozen or so Common Pleas, district, and senior judges from Butler County who will volunteer their time over a four-day period this week.

The competition is for high school students with a penchant for the art of argument, said Cranberry lawyer Jennifer Gilliland Vanasdale, whose law firm is coordinating district and regional competitions.

Eight teams from the Butler and Lawrence County area will participate in the district-level competition, which will run tomorrow, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. The school districts sending teams are Butler, Freeport, Moniteau, Seneca Valley and Slippery Rock in Butler County and Laurel in Lawrence County. These schools are among the 257 high school teams meeting in district-level competition across Pennsylvania.

After district level competitions, Butler will host the regional competition for the first time, Ms. Gilliland Vanasdale said. This competition, scheduled for March 14 at the Butler County Courthouse, will include winners of the district-level competition from all over northwestern Pennsylvania.

The state championships will be March 30-31 in Harrisburg. The winner will represent Pennsylvania in national finals in May in Dallas.

"This whole program is inspiring," said Ms. Gilliland Vanasdale, whose firm has coordinated the local competition for four years.

"For the most part, these are students who are interested in debate, government, the law. ... It's really exciting ... to see young people who have an interest in the careers that we do every day," she said.

Each of the districts fields teams of 11th- and 12th-graders, with the exception of Seneca Valley, which also sends ninth-and 10th-grade teams.

Double-elimination trials, which run from about 5:45 p.m. to about 9 p.m. each evening, end with a final face-off Friday. Local Common Pleas, district and senior judges volunteer to act as presiding judges during the mock trials. Lawyers volunteer as jurors. Both judges and jurors score student litigators; middle school pupils volunteer as bailiffs and time-keepers.

Butler County Common Pleas Judge William Shaffer will be in the courtroom each nights of the competition. It's something he's done annually since he took the bench.

"I'm so impressed with these kids. I can't imagine doing what they do when I was their age, he said.

Ms. Gilliland Vanasdale said the students' talents were often awe-inspiring. Two years ago, she and her husband and partner, Gary Vanasdale, were so impressed with one student they invited him to apply for an internship with their firm "someday."

"A month later, he called and he's been working for us on his breaks from the University of Maryland since," she said of Mark Wilson, an assistant in her office.

Sponsored statewide by the Pennsylvania Bar Association Young Lawyers Division, the competition gives eight-member teams a chance to argue both sides of a case with facts provided them from the state level.

The students play the roles of lawyers, witnesses, plaintiffs and defendants, and are helped to prepare by teacher coaches and lawyer advisers.

This year, the case centers on threatening remarks that appeared on a high school-run Internet chat room that a student says caused severe emotional distress, resulting in lower grades and loss of a valedictorian scholarship.