For nearly 30 years, J.B. Spence and Roland W. “Buddy” Payne constituted a formidable legal team that won scores of multimillion-dollar verdicts for victims of corporate negligence and medical malpractice.

Veterans of Miami’s storied Perry Nichols firm, they established Spence, Payne & Masington in 1967 with partner Richard Masington, kept it running under various names until 1995, and died just days apart in November: Payne on the 19th, at 75; Spence on the 23rd, at 89.

Spence was “smaller and feistier. Buddy was big, handsome, affable,’’ said former law partner Stuart Z. Grossman. “But they were very much alike in terms of being great personalities: magnetic.’’

“They each had natural talents,’’ added Masington, who retired in 1987. “J.B. was enormously charming, with a twinkle in his eye. He came from a poor background and considered himself a common man. Buddy was a football star ... also very charming, gregarious.’’

Together, they took on airlines after crashes — including Pan Am, Eastern, ValuJet, Arrow Air and National — and hospitals where patients died, as well as careless drivers, inattentive doctors and deceptive manufacturers who killed and maimed.

In 1988, they settled 12 wrongful-death cases worth $15 million against Arrow Air, and three years later got $19 million for the children of Celtina Montenegro, shot and killed outside the Dade County Auditorium in 1990 by Gerardo Balmaseda.

Their first huge case: representing the parents of two teenagers killed when a Dominican cargo plane smashed into the family’s auto body shop near Miami International Airport in 1969.

When the jury awarded $1.8 million on May 19, 1970, for the death of one boy, Spence fainted in the courtroom. It was said to be the largest amount ever awarded at that time for the death of a child.

When he came to, Spence wept, according to The Miami Herald’s coverage of the trial. A separate jury awarded $600,000 for the second boy, Masington recalled.

Spence, of Coral Gables, went on to serve as president of both the Dade County Bar Association and the Academy of Florida Trial Lawyers. Known as the “dean of torts,’’ he was a 2010 Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame inductee.

He wrote two books: Opening and Closing Arguments: The Law in Florida and The Life of a Trial Lawyer.

He served on the Florida Constitution Revision Committee and the Florida Judicial Nominating Committee.

Named J.B. at birth, on March 31, 1922, in Hot Springs, Ark., Spence grew up on an Oklahoma tenant farm and joined the U.S. Navy at 17, serving on ships incombat zones during World War II.

After the war ended, he settled in Miami, working odd jobs while attending night school at Lindsay Hopkins Technical Education Center. He went on to the University of Miami, then the UM law school, where he later taught.

Grossman, whose name was added to the firm after he joined it in 1978, recalled that Spence worked his way through law school as a janitor. He served as an assistant state attorney general before entering private practice.

Daughter Martha Spence, who lived with her father and his cat, Callie, believes his dedication to justice for “the little guy’’ stemmed from the early loss of his mother in a car crash with a drunk driver. Spence was 12.