Brewster Rawls

Rawls went to law school with what he calls a “very strange notion” of becoming a real estate lawyer, a plan doomed by his admitted inability to proofread. Raised in a Navy family with no lawyers in it, he majored in politics at Wake Forest, served three years as an Army artillery officer in the 101st Airborne, then joined an insurance defense firm in the far southwest corner of Virginia. He tried about 20 jury trials in his first two and a half years and discovered it was what he was born to do.

Rawls spent roughly three decades as a defense lawyer in Virginia, trying well over 100 medical malpractice jury trials, before switching fully to the plaintiff side. That history, he says, “gives me an incredible edge because I know what can be defended and what can’t.” Rawls Law Group has handled Federal Tort Claims Act cases for veterans and military families nationwide for 25 years — about 80% involving VA medical care — and he has been admitted pro hac vice in more than 35 jurisdictions.

A defense case in which his client, a difficult doctor, was the only physician to read an abnormal EKG as normal. No expert would support him, and the doctor refused to settle even after Rawls called him a moron to his face. So Rawls tried the case in rural Southside, Virginia, without experts, needling the plaintiff’s paid witnesses — and won. Walking out, the client told him, “I told you it was a stupid case.” The lesson, he says: with creativity, even an objectively unwinnable case can be pulled out.

Rawls worries that jury trials are disappearing and that young lawyers no longer get the experience he got trying “piddly little cases” in Southwest Virginia. Trial work, he says, is learned by doing, like riding a bicycle. “I’m not a litigator. I don’t flog the file and then settle it at the last minute,” he says. He points to active-duty service members, long barred by the Feres doctrine, who still have no recourse to court for military malpractice — and to an overseas case where the Army offered $125,000 for a baby’s death.

Rawls Law Group, a veteran-owned firm in Richmond, Virginia, focuses on medical malpractice, primarily Federal Tort Claims Act cases against VA and military healthcare providers on behalf of veterans and military families across the country, plus Indian Health Service claims. The firm opened its 1,000th FTCA file the day of his interview. Reported results include a $975,000 settlement for a veteran after Navy doctors missed his wife’s breast cancer and $800,000 settlements in a misread-ultrasound case and a case of ignored heart conditions. Website: rawlslawgroup.com.

Rawls earned a B.A., cum laude, in politics from Wake Forest University in 1978 and his J.D. from the University of Richmond School of Law in 1984, after serving as a field artillery officer with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division. He has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America since 2013 and was named a Best Lawyers Lawyer of the Year in 2015, a Virginia Lawyers Weekly “Leader in the Law” in 2017 and its Go-To Lawyer for medical malpractice in 2021. He is a fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America.

Rawls wrote “Can You Believe We Get Paid for Having So Much Fun?” for Trial Lawyer’s Journal, a piece that opens with his meeting Harry Thompson in the late 1980s, when Rawls was an aggressive young attorney in his mid-30s who, he concedes, some might have called arrogant. The publication also ran “Brewster Rawls’ ‘Closing Argument,’” a reflective piece on integrity, mentorship and the enduring pursuit of truth in trial law, drawn from his decades in the courtroom.