Hailing from Vietnam, Ha My Linh has been named the 2024-2025 Young ICCA Scholarship winner, which provides one full tuition award each year to the White & Case International Arbitration Program at the University of Miami School of Law.
At 18 years old, Linh had no idea what to do with her life. Her life changed when her sister told her she was good at arguing and should become a lawyer. Since then, her destiny has been clear to her.
Linh enrolled in the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam to earn her Bachelor of Law in international law in 2015. Joining the academy’s moot court club and networking with practicing arbitrators brought golden opportunities on her way to take the Vietnamese bar.
Linh led her moot court team in an international competition in Hong Kong. Linh’s group was significantly disadvantaged in the contest, lacking funding for a coach and new books.
“[Our] book was so old, it would fall apart,” Linh said. “But we kept continuing to use that to learn [the case] by ourselves and prepare for it.”
Though they lost the competition, nothing would stop Linh from reaching the corners of the world to become the best arbitrator she could be. In her senior year, Linh studied abroad in Sydney at the University of New South Wales for two semesters. She learned common arbitration and mediation practices while preparing to apply for internships.
After building her expertise in Sydney, Linh earned an internship at the Australian Centre for International Commercial Arbitration. She drafted case summaries and conducted legal research into the development of mediation in Vietnam. A chance encounter at the ACICA took her to her first mediation hearing.
While at a cafe, Linh recognized a mediator struggling with the coffee machine. Linh helped him and told him she was an international intern. On the spot, the mediator told Linh to visit his confidential mediation hearing. It’s a moment she’ll never forget.
“When you make connections in this career, you can make friends as well as have more opportunities to work in different workplaces,” Linh said. “Maybe one day I can be on his team.”
Though Linh found her groove in Australia, she was ready for her next adventure. As a tribunal secretary for the Young International Council for Commercial Arbitration, Linh became interested in the organization’s full-tuition scholarship program.
Young ICCA offers international students the opportunity to study law in different nations, like Switzerland and China. Linh consulted with her Young ICCA mentor, who she described as Hong Kong’s father of arbitration, to prepare the perfect application.
Her work paid off. Linh was awarded a full-tuition scholarship to earn her LL.M in International Arbitration at Miami Law from Young ICCA.
Linh treasures the Miami Law’s advocacy class and practicum program. She looks back at working for an independent arbitrator and the lessons she learned when dealing with real-life cases under the program.
She spends her time practicing for the New York bar, hoping to take her practice there or back home to Vietnam.
“You can’t learn everything from the University. You have to learn from practice,” Linh said. “This is one of the good points of the practicum program because they have you work for a real law firm.”
Read more about Miami Law’s White & Case International Arbitration LL.M. program.
