More Than Words: Insurance lawyer Justin Pruett L’11 takes a different route into the courtroom

When Justin Pruett L’11, Director of Claims for HCA Healthcare, walks into negotiations, he commands respect as “the guy in the corner with the money” who makes settlement and litigation decisions in multi-million-dollar medical malpractice cases.

Years ago, though, Pruett was “the guy who wouldn’t shut up in my English class.” As a talkative high school freshman, he was invited to join his school’s mock trial team. That experience sparked an interest in litigation, but along the way, he turned from a kid who dreamed of arguing before the Supreme Court into a strategic decisionmaker “looking at the worst of the worst situations in people's lives and trying to do what's best, not just for the company, but also for them.”

Even though he was interested in a legal career, Pruett took a few years after college to “figure out who I was.” He worked as a casualty insurance adjustor before starting at Roger Williams University School of Law in 2008. At RWU Law, he enjoyed his classes with Judge William Smith, who based many of the hypotheticals in his criminal procedure class on an insurance fact pattern. An externship with MetLife Auto & Home also helped shape his career.

Today, Pruett handles the malpractice litigation docket for HCA Healthcare, one of the largest for-profit healthcare systems in the U.S. He analyzes the factual and legal merits along with the insurance implications for each of the hundreds of cases his team handles.

Shortly after he began handling medical malpractice claims, a mentor showed the once-loquacious Pruett how to carry himself in court and at the negotiation table. Pruett recalls, “I went to my first mediation with him, and he said, ‘You know, when you walk into a room, the people need to know who you are. They don't need to hear you, because if they know who you are, they already know you, and that you have the capacity to close the deal.’”
 

Even before that, Pruett says, “My mom told me as a kid that I needed to be quiet more, so I learned how to say things without talking, and I learned how to communicate in a variety of different ways that I think serves me well in this job, because while I'm not in front of a judge every day, I have to communicate to a lot of different audiences.” 

Pruett also credits his mother, who worked 25 years as a legal assistant for a medical malpractice insurance company, with introducing him to the medical terminology in which he is now fluent. “It never dawned on me that there might have been some sort of innate juju that she was bringing home that just kind of embedded itself on my psyche,” says Pruett.

While Pruett spends plenty of time in court, it isn’t in the role he’d once envisioned. He encourages law students to look beyond the courtroom to fulfilling careers in the insurance industry. “I think when you're in law school, you don't realize that there are other ways to use the skill sets that you are learning,” he says. “I hope that people understand that there are a variety of different legal professions and highways and roads you can go to using your law degree to get into the insurance industry and to have a pretty fruitful career path.”