Thanks to each of you who has ordered the third edition of Day on Torts:  Leading Cases in Tennessee Tort Law.     Hundreds of books have been shipped in the last two months and orders are continuing to flow in.  

Day on Torts identifies more than 300 Tennessee tort law subjects and provides summary of the leading case on each subject to give you a quick, readable synopsis of current state of the law. Many of the summaries include citations to other cases, giving you even more insight and helping narrow the scope of your research.

The good news is that books are still available.  The bad news is that because the books are hard-cover and designed for pocket parts,  once they are gone they will not be available again for three or four years (until the pocket part becomes so thick that a new edition of the book becomes necessary).  The expense of a limited, second printing of the third edition is cost-prohibitive.  Therefore, those lawyers who do not obtain a copy of the third edition will have to wait until the fourth edition is available to have their own copy of the book. 

Today (August 4) I will be speaking on behalf of the Nashville Bar Association about various tort and civil procedure topics that cause lawyers to lose sleep.  The title of the speech is " KEY PRACTICE STRATEGIES FOR TORT LAWYERS: SOLVING ISSUES THAT KEEP YOU UP AT NIGHT."   The program qualifies for 1.5 hours of CLE credit.

Read more here.

The government of Thailand wants to have a scheme to compensate victims of medical malpractice. Many Thai doctors are opposed to the law.  Here is an argument made by the physicians, as reported in Taiwan News:

It means our staff would have to be extra careful during work, which would decrease efficiency," said Somkid Auapisithwong of Thai Federation of Doctors, Main Hospitals and General Hospitals, which looks after the interests of medical practitioners in state hospitals. "We’re already very stretched. Some of our nurses have to work almost 365 days. This would add more stress to our staff. They would have to be extra careful with all sorts of risks  and this will hinder their work.

Thanks to Torts Prof for informing me about this article.

This post is part of our continuing effort to advise Tennessee lawyers about substantive law changes resulting from the actions of the General Assembly.

Public Chapter 865 sets forth maximum charges to lawyers (and presumably others) for obtaining medical records.  Here are the maximum charges:

The party requesting the patient’s records is responsible to the provider for the reasonable costs of copying and mailing such patient’s records. For other than records involving workers’ compensation cases, such reasonable costs shall not exceed twenty dollars ($20.00) for medical records five (5) pages or less in length and fifty cents (50¢) per page for each page copied after the first five (5) pages and the actual cost of mailing. Any third-party provider of record copying and related services shall be subject to the reasonable cost limits contained in this section and shall not impose any charge or fee for such services in excess of such cost limits. The costs charged for reproducing records of patients involved in a workers’ compensation claim shall be as defined in § 50-6-204.
 

This post is part of our continuing effort to advise Tennessee lawyers about substantive law changes resulting from the actions of the General Assembly.

Public Chapter 858 sets forth a procedure for helping injured workers obtain medical benefits they are entitled to receive after a judgment or settlement of a worker’s compensation action.  It allows a Department of Labor employee to order an employer to pay for treatment and award attorney’s fees and costs incurred by the employee to obtain the benefits.

It became effective on April 30, 2010.

This post is a part of our effort to advise our fellow lawyers of statutes that were enacted during the 2010 legislative session.

Public Chapter 850 is known at "Katie Beth’s Law."    It requires the use of pool alarms in all swimming pools ( a defined term) installed after July 1, 2011.  The poorly-drafted act excludes public pools and pools in multi-family housing operations.  The failure to install a pool alarm is a Class C misdemeanor.

"Katie Beth’s Law" is named a child who drowned in a residential swimming pool in Cookeville in 2009.  Katie Beth was the great granddaughter of Sen. Charlotte Burks.

A recent study gives yet another reason of why it is difficult for a plaintiff to win a medical malpractice case in Nashville.

MTSU’s Business and Economic Research Center has released a study that states that puts health care industry’s annual economic impact in Nashville at $30 billion. That represents  an increase of 60 percent since 2004.  The number of jobs in teh Nashville MSA directly tied to the health care industry has grown from 94,000 to more than 110,000.

The study reports that "[m]ore than 56 major health care companies (public and private) have chosen Nashville as their home, and seven of the nation’s 12 leading for-profit acute care hospital companies are located in Nashville, controlling more than one-third of the investor-owned hospitals in the United States."

This is one of a series of posts that will excerpt sections from the third edition of my book, Day on Torts: Leading Tennessee Tort Cases.  To order the book go here.

§ 14.1     Generally

The Case: Anderson v. Armstrong, 171 S.W.2d 401 (Tenn. 1943).

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