Day on Torts
Where the trial court found that the statute of limitations barred an HCLA claim based on two different grounds, but the plaintiff only appealed one of those grounds, dismissal was affirmed.
In Bartsch v. Premier Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine, PLC, No. M2024-00971-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. Aug. 12, 2025), the plaintiff filed a health care liability suit against his surgeon’s employer based on a surgery that occurred in April 2022. Pre-suit notice letters were sent to several providers, and one of the addresses listed for the surgeon was “Hughston Clinic Orthopaedics, PC.”
The plaintiff first filed suit in federal court based on diversity jurisdiction in July 2023, naming only The Hughston Clinic Southeast, PC as a defendant. According to the complaint, the clinic was the surgeon’s employer. The clinic responded by stating that it was not the surgeon’s employer and not a proper party to the lawsuit. In its answer, the clinic named Premier Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine, PLC (“Premier”), as the surgeon’s actual employer.
In October 2023, the plaintiff sent pre-suit notice to Premier, and then filed this HCLA case in state court asserting vicarious liability for the surgeon’s negligence. Premier moved to dismiss based on the statute of limitations. The plaintiff argued that he did not learn that Premier caused his injury until September 2023 when the other clinic filed its answer in federal court. Premier, however, argued that its identity was readily available on the Tennessee Secretary of State’s website when the pre-suit notice letters were initially sent.
The trial court ultimately took judicial notice of the information contained in printouts from the Secretary of State’s website. The trial court dismissed the case as time-barred, specifically finding that (1) a reasonable person would have been able to determine Premier’s identify through the Secretary of State, and (2), “regardless of the information obtained from the Secretary of State’s website, enough information was contained in [the plaintiff’s exhibit containing pre-suit notice letters] to place a reasonable person on notice of the need to perform due diligence in investigating information pertaining to Premier Orthopaedics.”
The plaintiff appealed the dismissal, and while his appellate brief challenged the trial court’s decision to take judicial notice of information from the Secretary of State’s website, it did not “address the trial court’s alternate finding regarding the information attached to the complaint.” The only issue the plaintiff presented for appellate review related to the first basis of the trial court’s dismissal. The trial court, however, identified two alternative and independent grounds for finding the claim time-barred and granting the motion to dismiss. “[W]here a trial court provides more than one separate and independent ground for its judgment and a party fails to appeal one or more of the independent grounds, [the Court of Appeals] must affirm the judgment of the trial court on the ground that was not challenged on appeal.” (internal citation omitted). Because the alternative basis for dismissal was not appealed, dismissal was affirmed.
This opinion was released five months after oral arguments in this case.