THE RAINMAKER REVIEW
The Rainmaker Review
Jasper Smith
Busn 210 Business Law
Professor Sauchuck
In the film, “The Rainmaker”, Rudy Baylor is a young man who just graduated law school. Rudy is having a hard time finding a full time job, and has yet to pass the bar exam. He eventually finds a job as an ‘ambulance chaser’ for a personal injury lawyer named “Bruiser”. Rudy already has a couple cases that he brings with him to the firm. One is an insurance case involving a young man dying of leukemia whose mother is suing a very large Insurance Agency who denied coverage for her son. The other case is an elderly woman who is having Rudy write her a will that takes her worthless children out of it. Not soon after, Bruiser is being investigated by the FBI, so Rudy and one of Bruiser’s assistants, Deck Shifflet, go off on their own and begin their own small firm. Also, Rudy finds a young woman that has been brutally beaten by her husband. Rudy begins to fall in love with the girl and urges her to divorce her husband. When he finally convinces her to leave her husband, they get caught in her house trying to gather her things to leave. Things escalate to an all-out fight be Rudy and the woman’s husband. The husband ends up being killed in the fight and the girl tells Rudy to run and that she would claim self-defense. The case against the young woman is soon dropped though. At the end of the movie, Rudy wins the case against the Insurance Company but stops practicing law to teach ethics because he simply cannot stand corporate America and the way our legal system has become.
The plaintiff in the film is Dot Black, the mother of the dying boy with leukemia. She is represented by Rudy and Deck. The Defendant in the case is Great Benefit, the Insurance Company who has denied the bone-marrow treatment for the boy. Great Benefit is represented by the large, savvy, experienced law firm headed by Leo F. Drummond.
The main issue in the case is that Great Benefits claim...