One of the battles in the preparation of scheduling orders is the deadlines for disclosure of expert witnesses. The defense always wants the plaintiff to go first, and wants an additional 30 or 60 or even 90 days to disclose its experts. Sometimes, the defense wants to depose the plaintiff’s experts before…
Nashville trial lawyer John T. Conners, Jr. died yesterday in his home in West Meade. He would have turned 90 in March 2010. He was a name-partner at Boult Cummings Conners & Berry in Nashville and practiced law over 50 years.. To say that John Conners was an excellent lawyer is an…
A couple years ago I wrote this post about how to exercise preemptory challenges. Last week, I got a call from a lawyer on this issue once again, and thought I should re-run it. It is always a good idea to ask the trial judge at the pretrial conference or…
This is the last of 22 posts in our series of the new laws of interest to tort lawyers. If you missed any of these posts all of them are collected in the "Legislation 2009" category. The last post concerns the changes to the rules of civil procedure, evidence, and…
Post 21 of this series re-designates the current language of existing T.C.A. Section 70-7-104 (the Recreational Use Statute) as subsection (a) and then adds a subsection (b). Thus, as of July 1, the new statute reads as follows: (a) This part does not limit the liability that otherwise exists for:…
A reader sent me an article in September – October 2009 issue of Harvard Magazine that discusses the work of Dr. Atul Gawande. Dr. Gawande is very interested in patient safety. One of his interests is the use of medical checklists, a subject I have addressed in a previous post. Apparently, …
Post 20 (we are almost finished with this series folks, I promise) concerns judicial selection and evaluation. So much has been written about this subject the last four years. The bill is 16 pages in lengh and cannot be summarized here. If you are truly interest in reading this legislation,…
Last week I filed a post on the new members of the Judicial Selection Commission. Today, the appointees to the Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission were announced. The Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission, which replaces the Judicial Evaluation Commission, evaluates the performance of the appellate level judges who are up for re-election. Prior…
Post 19 addresses the liability of "agritourism professionals." What, in heaven’s name, is a agritourism professional? A person involved in agritourism, of course. And what is that? Agritourism is any activity carried out on a farm or ranch, eligible for greenbelt classification under Title 67, Chapter 5, Part 10, that allows members…
The September 2009 edition of the Tennessee Trial Law Report is in the mail. The lazy days of summer are upon us – this edition includes a summary of just 10 different cases addressing various aspects of the law of torts, civil procedure, evidence and trial as decided by Tennessee…