You know the general rule: absent a special relationship, one person does not have a duty to come to the aid of another. You can see someone drowning, calling out for help, and simply walk by listening to your Ipod and taking a another lick of your Maggie Moo’s ice cream…
Walk into any courtroom in the state in any given week and there is a one-day trial underway in a soft tissue injury case. A defense lawyer is standing before the jury, waving a photograph of the plaintiff’s vehicle and saying "How can the plaintiff be hurt? The rear bumper…
The L.A. Times has written a major story on safety problems at U-Haul. An excerpt: "U-Haul, the nation’s largest provider of rental trailers, says it is "highly conservative" about safety. But a yearlong Times investigation, which included more than 200 interviews and a review of thousands of pages of court…
The Kentucky Supreme Court has ruled that damages for pre-impact fear cannot be recovered in a wrongful death case. The Court said that "The proof of the fear in this case the testimony of a person at the scene of the accident that the decedent’s facial expression showed she saw…
Here is an interesting article titled "Electronic Health Records Raise New Risks of Malpractice Liability." An excerpt: "Because more detailed information about patient care or medical decision-making may be included in the EHR than is possible with paper records, plaintiff attorneys may make extensive discovery requests for "relevant" electronic information in…
Here is a follow-up story on my earlier post about a lawyer who indicated that a judge was a few fries short of a Happy Meal.
The TMA hates the Givens and Alsip opinions. The hospitals would prefer they did not exist, but were willing to accept some compromise as opposed to the outright reversal of the decisions sought by the TMA. This is what the hospitals worked out with the interested parties and the sponsors of…
The General Assembly has approved changes to the Rules of Evidence, the Rules of Civil Procedure, and the Rules of Appellate Procedure. Perhaps the most significant change for practicing lawyers is the amendment to Rule 15 of the Rules of Civil Procedure, which provides that "For amendments adding defendants pursuant to…
The Tennessee General Assembly has passed a new dog bite liability statute, known as the "“Dianna Acklen Act of 2007”. Section 44-8-413. (a) (1) The owner of a dog has a duty to keep that dog under reasonable control at all times, and to keep that dog from running at…
The Tennessee Court of Appeals has released two opinions on the issue of apparent agency in a hospital setting. One case concerns an emergency room doctor, the other a radiologist. The law? Both decisions contain these paragraphs: "Apparent agency is essentially agency by estoppel. White v. Methodist Hosp., 844 S.W.2d…