Introducing Rainey Booth, Jr. - Michles & Booth

Transcript: Introducing Rainey Booth, Jr.

Good morning, and welcome to this week’s edition of the Michles & Booth video blog. I’m Marcus Michles, and I’m joined today by a guy with a really strange name. We’re not exactly sure who he is, but we’ve done a little background, and it turns out that he is the heir apparent to the Booth throne of legal brain trust. This is Rainey Booth in the flesh Jr. Yep. How are you, Rainey? I’m good. So we’ve got to tell your story, because you’re like the crown prince of a powerful Booth dynasty.

First of all, for those that don’t know, Rainey’s Dad, Rainey, one of long-time closest friends and the guys picture’s next to mine on the Billboard’s, probably the best trial lawyer I’ve ever known, so that’s a little bit of pressure, but Rainey Jr.’s got a bunch of pressure from going back…good grief…a century. I mean he’s got a family heritage. You could write a book about the Booth family but from my perspective, before I before came to this area, right after I came this area, before I became friends with Rainey, my partner, I knew Ed Booth, your grandfather as a very prominent defense lawyer in Tallahassee, and of course, I knew your grandmother, Judge Booth to me. Judge Booth was the first woman appellate judge in the state of Florida, as I understand it, and just an outstanding judge, kind of hard on the plaintiffs, we would say. She was a little bit conservative in her philosophy but very fair, very fair-minded and really a brilliant legal mind. I don’t just say that, because I don’t practice for her, and she’s not on the bench anymore, so I don’t have to say that, do I? But no, she was truly a talent, and it goes on and on and on Rainey, Jr.’s sister is getting ready to graduate. Rainey, Jr.’s mom is a lawyer. There’s just a tremendous bunch of legal talent on that side of the family. That’s why…that’s why I joined these guys is because they do all the thinking, and they do all the heavy lifting.

We’ve got Rainey, Jr. here. We all call him RB3, because nobody wants to be called “junior”, and Rainey’s just got confusion with his Dad so we call him RB3, and so tell us what you know so far. How do you like it? Well, I love working here so far. Um, you know my first week I got to go to Panama City and be involved a little bit with that med mal trial that you had going on.
In just one week I learned probably more than I learned my whole first semester at Florida.

That’s cool. That’s cool. Just to fill in some background, you’re a law clerk. A lot of people really misunderstand. We’ve hired you as a summer clerk. You’ve finished your first year. You’re in the top 10%. You booked a couple of classes. The family would be proud, but they expect you to perform, so that was expected of you probably. Yep. There’s lots of pressure like you were talking about. Yeah, and you’re at the University of Florida, prominent school; the Fred Levin School of Law.
You know, I love it. It’s great. I really enjoy the classes, and the teachers. We’ve got a lot of Harvard-trained professors. Almost every professor I’ve had went to
Harvard. They’re very intellectual, but I don’t hold that against them. I like it a lot.

Yeah, and the trial…you got here. As soon as you got on board, we put your running shoes on, raced you over to Bay County. We had a med mal trial over there; interesting factual scenario, not uncommon one to our experience. A gentleman was in the hospital, had some tests run. One of the test was a chest x-ray which revealed a lesion in the lung. Unfortunately, the radiologist did not communicate directly with the doctors up on the floor taking care of the gentleman. It went some months undiagnosed, and ultimately when they found it, it had metastasized to his brain. He didn’t survive very long.

It sounds like a slam dunk, but you probably were surprised, weren’t you, to learn about causation, and it’s an issue that we talk about on another blog about med mal cases, but sometimes you can make an obvious mistake in medicine and not really be responsible, because you can argue, as they did successfully at the trial. The physician’s lawyers argued that “hey even if they had told the man, he would have still died from the very same cancer”.

So in medical malpractice, you have to prove negligence and you have to prove causation and damages, and that has to be linked together. In other words, their negligence has to have specifically caused the damage that resulted in the death, and in this case, the undiagnosed and untreated lung tumor had by argument already metastasized and would have been terminal even if appropriately reported when it should have been. Until you went, I heard you did some excellent research.

The story I heard…this is the problem. This is the problem, folks, when you hire young smart people. They have technological skills, so the lawyers and the paralegals are working on their laptops trying to do some research, and RB3 pulls out his phone and knocks it out and hands it to them before they can get it done. And you know what? Making us look bad is not…that’s not a career-advancing thing. I apologize. You have to slow yourself down a little bit. You’ve got to ease into this. You can’t be embarrassing people in the courtroom right away.

I’m sorry. Well, see…that particular scenario I got very excited in the heat of the moment, and I wasn’t just going to sit there and not do anything in the courtroom, so I pulled out my iPhone and looked it up and found it pretty quickly actually.

Yeah, you nailed it. Yeah and the judge came back with the same case that we found, and that was kind of a nerve-wracking moment, and I didn’t want to be just sitting there.
Good for you. Good for you. Well, we’re very excited to have you. It’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re going to get you doing a lot of different stuff, and we’re going to try to test you a little bit. At the end of the summer, we’ll bring you back, and you can tell everybody what you learned and what you think you might do differently next to time. Awesome. I look forward to that.

Okay, tell us a couple of other things now. Do you have any idea right now what kind of law you want to practice or is it way too early for that? You know, to be on the safe side, I would say it’s probably a little bit too early, but I do…I’m very interested in the specific work that this firm does. I think it’s, you know, it’s good for the community to have people who stand up and fight for them against, you know, the big bad insurance companies and stuff like that. That’s really the one aspect of it that I like the most. Sorry to interrupt you, but they are teaching you in law school that insurance companies are indeed evil, right? I mean that’s part of the curriculum, right? I mean you’ve got Harvard-trained people there. That’s what I mean, one of the teachers was more of a, you know, the insurance companies need help, and I’m sitting there going I know better, but…Come on…

Yeah, I booked his course, but other than that, they aren’t…you drank the Kool Aid and you sucked up. Come on. Just on that one exam, I did what I had to do. You know. But I, you know, I keep my personal beliefs out, as you probably should in that scenario. Yeah. It’s not a controversial conclusion. No. I mean insurance companies are evil. Right. They’re just evil. We…we know that. Yeah. Ok. Good. As long as we have that straight. We had to screen you correctly. I mean we know the heritage and the brain power and all that, but you’ve got to have the fundamentals down, my man.

Yeah. Okay. And when we get around to the fantasy football league this year, you’re in, right? Yes, sir. So you’ve got to be working on your team name, your team logo. There’s some pressure here. We’re not just fooling around. Okay. I’m going to have to start thinking about it. And you’re going to have to put a little bit of that money that we’re paying you aside because there’s…there’s, you know, coffee purchase requirements and lunch tabs that have to be picked, and you’re going to be the rookie, so… Alright. Just let me know. Okay. Alright.

Listen. If you’ve got some questions, want to know what it’s like to be a law clerk, Rainey’s going to do some blog writing. He’s going to be doing some updating. He’s going to be the man. So, if you’ve got questions, or maybe if you’re a law student and you want to know how you get into this track, let us know. I do want you to know that I’m drafting the anti-nepotism clause as we speak right now… That’s funny… so I don’t have to pay you an exorbitant amount of money to bring you on board in two years. I can see myself getting worked already on that. You probably should start drafting that.
Yeah. Actually, you know what I’m going to do? I ought to delegate that to you. Sounds like something a law clerk’s responsibility. Come up with the Michles & Booth anti-nepotism plan, and have it on my desk by tomorrow. Okay? Okay. Yes, sir. Good. Well, listen. Thanks for joining us. We’ll have Rainey on again. We’ve also…next week we’re going to have our other law clerk on. She’s new…she’s not new. She clerked with us last year. You’ll meet her, and if you’ve got any questions about how this all works, give us a shout. I’m Marcus Michles along with RB3.