Floyd S. “Trey” Mills III is a fighter, and he’s willing to fight for you.
Mills, a partner in Anderson’s Trammell & Mills Law Firm LLC, has an understanding of “the good fight” from his teenage years, when he faced a harrowing battle with leukemia that left him hospitalized for 23 days.
As a fit and seemingly healthy 17-year-old who had just returned from the American Legion Palmetto Boys State, Mills’ life was changed when an aunt playfully hit him.
“I came home from Boys State and an aunt punched me in the stomach because I had a washboard stomach back then,” Mills recalled. “I almost threw up and fell down because I had tumors all through my body. I lost about 10 pounds that week. I went to the hospital and got my white blood cell count, and I heard my mama scream. That still sticks with me to this day. I had a 180,000 white count where normal is 5,000 to 10,000.”
The teenager would go on to endure a number of painful procedures as the doctors worked successfully to reverse the course of the cancer that racked his body. Mills’ remission wasn’t the end of the story, however.
“That left us bills for more than $800,000, back in the ’90s,” he said. “I heard my mom constantly fighting with the insurance company, and they didn’t want to pay anything. I realized then that it’s a dog-eat-dog world. Big businesses will run you over if they can.”
Mills made the decision to go into law after his mother, a nurse, was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“The hospital she worked at tried to push her out and said she couldn’t get short-term disability after she worked there for 15 years,” he recalled.
It was the final straw for Mills.
“I just said to heck with it, it was time for me to go to law school so I could level the playing field, so to speak,” he said.
Mills has continued to fight for the underdog throughout his 18-year legal career with Ernie Trammell. He said Trammell & Mills is more interested in winning cases than settling out of court.
“It’s frustrating when I see all these TV ads that are for settlement mills,” Mills said. “We’re not a settlement mill — we’re real, local lawyers who know where the courthouse is. I hate insurance companies. I have a chip on my shoulder to do what I do.”
