Show Notes

In this episode of “Celebrating Justice,” trial lawyer Brewster Rawls from the Rawls Law Group shares his journey from spending over three decades as a defense lawyer before switching to full-time plaintiff and how that experience sets him apart. He shares stories about the unique focus of his firm on FTCA and Veterans Medical Malpractice. Brewster emphasizes the importance of trial experience and the ability to go to court for achieving justice. He also shares a story of winning a case without experts and discusses the challenges faced by military members in seeking recourse for malpractice.

Chapters

1:33 – Why did you want to become a trial lawyer?
3:24 – What makes you unique?
7:45 – A Case that Matters.
10:18 – Brewster’s “Closing Argument”

Takeaways

Defense experience gives trial lawyers an edge in knowing what can be defended and what can’t be defended.
Trial experience is invaluable in understanding what works and what doesn’t work in presenting a case to a court or jury.
The ability to go to court and have recourse is essential for achieving justice, especially in cases involving military malpractice.
The legal profession needs more trial lawyers who can go to court and try cases effectively.

Transcript

[Theme Song Plays]

Brewster Rawls: About 10 years ago or so, I had gotten tired of being a defense lawyer. My client turned to me and said, “I told you it was a stupid case.” I’m very proud of the fact that I am a trial lawyer. I’m not a litigator. I don’t flog the file and then settle it at the last minute. Didn’t do it as a defense lawyer. I don’t do it now.

[Narrator]: Welcome to Celebrating Justice, presented by the Trial Lawyers Journal and CloudLex, the NextGen Legal Cloud platform built exclusively for personal injury law. Get inspired by the nation’s top trial lawyers and share in the stories that shape our pursuit of justice. Follow the podcast and join our community at triallawyersjournal.com. Now here’s your host, editor of TLJ and VP of Marketing at CloudLex, Chad Sands.

Chad Sands: Welcome back, friends, to Celebrating Justice. In this episode, we hear from trial lawyer Brewster Rawls. Brewster spent over 30 years on the defense side before moving to pure plaintiff, in addition to specializing in veterans affairs and military malpractice. The Rawls Law Group is one of the country’s leading FTCA and Indian Health law firms. Listen as he shares stories about winning a case without experts and why this country needs recourse to court. And in order to do that, we need people who can go to court. As always, I asked him, “Why did you want to become a trial lawyer?”

Brewster Rawls: Originally, I went to law school with a very strange notion of being a real estate lawyer. And my law school transcripts reflect that. Fortunately, that didn’t happen because I was not then, and I’m still not now, the least bit good at proofreading. I would have been a terrible real estate lawyer, in fact. I ended up working for a firm that did insurance defense in the far southwest corner of Virginia and discovered that I loved it. In the first two and a half years of practice, I tried probably 20 jury trials. My joke is that the aggregate value of those cases was not likely more than a hundred thousand dollars, but they were my cases and I did a lot of it. And as they say, the rest is history. You know, I went on to work at other firms and ended up being a malpractice lawyer, but I stumbled into doing this and I’m very fortunate that I did because I feel like it’s what I was born to do.

Chad Sands: So your parents weren’t lawyers, or you didn’t grow up wanting to be an attorney when you were a kid?

Brewster Rawls: No lawyers in the family at all. No doctors either, for that matter, considering my malpractice work. No, I grew up in a Navy family. My dad was a career Navy officer. And I went to Wake Forest and majored in what my father called “unemployment politics.” Did three years in the Army as an artillery officer in the 101st Airborne and went to law school because I frankly didn’t really have any better idea of what to do with my life, except to say I didn’t want to stay on active duty in the Army, so.

Chad Sands: And then did you start on the defense side? Is that what you said?

Brewster Rawls: I did. I was actually a defense lawyer until really I switched over fully to being a plaintiff’s lawyer about seven years ago. Now we’ve been doing the federal tort claims cases against the government for 25 years now. But during much of that time I was a defense lawyer in Virginia and I tried well over a hundred medical malpractice jury trials plus other ones. And that’s a big number in this business. So I was three decades as a defense lawyer, full on.

Chad Sands: And how did you decide to make the switch to full plaintiff?

Brewster Rawls: Like a lot of things, it was circumstantial. About ten years ago or so, I had gotten tired of being a defense lawyer for a lot of reasons. I still had partners who did it, however, so we still had a fairly big defense practice, which meant I couldn’t switch over fully. So I decided to focus my practice on our federal tort claims work, veterans, military families all over the country. But then in 2016 and 17, my defense lawyers departed, so I ended up in a position where I could do that.

Chad Sands: Interesting. So, what do you think distinguishes what you bring into the courtroom or how you work with clients that compares to other trial lawyers?

Brewster Rawls: I think having the defense experience, which I do, gives me an incredible edge because I know what can be defended and what can’t be defended. There’s a lot of people out here who’ve done a little bit of defense work and then switched or, you know, some exposure, but there are very few out here who have the kind of history of doing defense work that I did and have seen as much as I did. And frankly, there just aren’t that many lawyers who have tried as many jury trials, you know, plus handling the FTC 8 cases. You know, that kind of experience has been invaluable. And at this point, it’s decades of it.

Chad Sands: Yeah, I mean 30 years on the defense side is a lot longer than most, you know, most attorneys I hear who kind of have made the switch. But I do notice your firm focuses on the FTCA and medical malpractice. Tell me a little bit about that unique focus that you guys–

Brewster Rawls: The federal court claims cases are ones where we primarily represent veterans and military families. Although we also do a fair amount of work with the Indian Health Service, Native Americans. But probably 80 percent of our cases in that regard relate to VA medical care. And we do that all over the country. We’ve done it for, I’d say, 25 years now at this point. In fact, today we opened up file number 1000 in our FTCA. You know, they’re cases that are defended by the government. You don’t get juries. It’s a claim process. It’s not particularly complicated or difficult, but it’s different. In lots of places, the local plaintiff’s bar knows how to handle federal court claims cases. Don’t get me wrong. I mean, particularly around large military concentrations. But I’ve been admitted pro hac vice, special admission in courts, in over 35 jurisdictions at this point.

Chad Sands: Is there a little bit different tactics or strategy when you’re dealing with federal court versus state or locals?

Brewster Rawls: Sure. One of the things about federal tort claims cases is you don’t get a jury in those cases. The trier of fact is a judge, which has its ups and downs. You don’t get the runaway juries and you don’t get that risk of a jury going crazy. But sometimes cases with esoteric medicine that would get lost on a jury can be successful in front of a judge. And likewise, some of the cases that, you know, you might roll the dice on with a jury, marginal liability, but huge damage facts, you don’t want those as an FTCA case. The values of the FTCA cases are often relatively modest, but we have found we’ve had good luck in settling cases both at the claim stage and also when we’ve had to litigate them.

Chad Sands: Speaking of cases, I know it’s difficult to choose one, but could you share a story of one case that has had an impact on you?

Brewster Rawls: Yeah, that is difficult to come up with one. And I go back to my defense days and I had a case which was, it was a very bad case. My doctor who I represented, who was a difficult, unpleasant fellow, was the only one who had read an EKG as normal. Even I, who can’t read EKGs, I was pretty sure it wasn’t normal. We got multiple expert reviews, and we could find no expert who could support us at all. And the doctor had a consent clause in his policy. The week before trial, I sat in his office, and it’s the only time I’ve ever done it. I called him an effing moron, although I used the full term, not to agree to settle the case. He refused to do so. So, I sat there, and I said, well, how do I try this case when I have no experts? I had no expert evidence at all. So I scratched my head and I said, “Well, okay.” And finally I came up with the idea that I’ll try it on the theory; I don’t need experts. And I did. And it was actually kind of the most fun I ever had, you know, because I was able to do things. Like I get a plaintiff, puts on perfectly respectable experts, and I was able to get up there in almost kind of comical fashion and say, “You know, doctor, isn’t it true that the plaintiff’s lawyer, he’s paid you $7,000 to be here, hasn’t he?” And it was in a rural county in Southside, Virginia. Yeah. Well, damned if the tactic didn’t work, we won.

Of course, the other part of that story is that as we walked out of the courtroom, my client turned to me and said, “I told you it was a stupid case.” You know, and that just sticks in my mind. It shows that even when you have a case that is objectively unwinnable, and you can have ones that are unlosable, with a little bit of creativity, you can pull it out and do something with it. Getting lucky? Sure. But a lot of lawyers would have just gone in there and kind of gone through the motions. Well, we don’t have any experts, but you know, you’ve got to weigh the evidence. No, I mean, I tried it like, “No, hell no. I don’t need an expert here, folks. Why does this guy bring these paid witnesses in?” Yes. And it worked. It’s also a pretty good example of why having done this for so long, and so much of it on the defense side, the experience is just invaluable. It makes me conservative in some ways, because I realize that even the best plaintiff’s case you have, you can lose it. Yeah. You can absolutely lose it. But, I know what works, I know what doesn’t work.

Chad Sands: I have to ask, you got another one on the flip side, on the plaintiff’s side, where you felt like it was unwinnable and you pulled it off?

Brewster Rawls: Not yet. Not yet. No. You know, I’ve tried, actually, I guess, five cases on the plaintiff’s side, and switching five full jury trials, won three. Two of them were the biggest verdicts of the year in Virginia those years. Another one we tried and lost, which I–, I’d actually–, it was a referral that came to us late, about three months before trial. We took it and ran with it, didn’t win. And then I tried one last fall, which was just, I ended up with a result that was just bizarre. I mean, we should have either gotten a two or three million dollar verdict or we should have lost and the jury gave us $284,000 plus interest, and I’m still not entirely sure how they calculated that.

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Now here is this episode’s closing argument.

Brewster Rawls: We need to have lawyers who are able to try cases. It scares me that right now the number of jury trials is dropping. And that experience is just not always available to people. And this is a business that you learn by doing. It’s like riding a bicycle, you can read about it all you like, you can be an expert on it, but you’ve got to go out there and actually do it, and people need experience. And if I were king of the world, if you will, I would try to figure out a way that we get young lawyers to have that experience. Harkening back to, to my early times in the wilds of Southwest Virginia, I learned how to handle cases, I learned how to try cases, and yeah, they were low value, piddly little cases, really.

But they were mine and I learned it. And right now you’re not seeing people who get that kind of experience anywhere. And we need that because there will always be a need for lawyers who are really able to try cases. I’m very proud of the fact that I am a trial lawyer. I’m not a litigator. I don’t flog the file and then settle it at the last minute. Didn’t do it as a defense lawyer. I don’t do it now. And you’ve got to be able to go in and present a case to a court or a jury and be able to do it effectively. I think that is absolutely critical for justice in our country. And I would say that even as a defense lawyer, you’ve got to have that ability to go in there and present the case.

Yes, if everybody’s doing everything right, and cases are being evaluated right, and being worked up right, the vast majority of them will settle. And they should settle, but there are ones that will not. And it is painful to go to court and watch some lawyer who just has no idea what he or she is doing. Not because they’re a bad individual, not because they’re dumb, they just simply haven’t had the experience. We need trial lawyers.

Let me give you kind of an example of what happens when you don’t have an ability to go to court on something. Active duty military members could not sue for many years under the Federal Drug Claims Act simply because they were on active duty. End of discussion. They could cut the wrong leg off, kill them, didn’t matter. Too bad. What was called the Ferries Doctrine barred it. Well, about three or four years ago, Congress did fix ferries. So they didn’t really fix it, because they enabled a provision where you could bring a claim for malpractice in a military hospital, but there was no recourse of being able to go to court. So, guess how well that has worked? The Army, the Air Force, and the Navy, they’re sort of like, “Eh, so what?,” you know? “We’ll get to it when we get to it, and like, no, we’re not going to pay you anything on that. You don’t like it? Oh, too bad. Too bad.”

And we’ve also dealt with that in what’s called the Military Claims Act, which are for overseas claims where, I mean, one of the worst cases I ever saw was where they just killed a baby in Korea. They just killed the baby. And the Army comes along and says, “Oh, we’ll pay you $125,000 for it, $125,000.” And I said, “Well, but look at this case, look at that.” It doesn’t matter, this is an MCA case. In the end of the day, it’s like, take it or leave it, you have no recourse. You’ve got to have that ability to have a recourse to court and you’ve got to have people who can go to court.

Chad Sands: That was trial lawyer Brewster Rawls. Thanks for sharing those stories. To learn more about Brewster and his firm, visit their website, www.rawlslawgroup.com. Alright, I’m Chad Sands. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Narrarator: You’ve been listening to Celebrating Justice presented by CloudLex and the Trial Lawyers Journal. Remember, the stories don’t end here. Visit www.triallawyersjournal.com to become part of our community and keep the conversation going. And for a deeper dive into the tools that empower personal injury law firms, visit www.cloudlex.com/tlj to learn more.