Day on Torts
Where an HCLA plaintiff added a claim for wrongful death to her health care liability action after her husband passed away, but she failed to file a certificate of good faith with her amended complaint, dismissal was affirmed.
In Allen v. Dehner, No. M2023-01750-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. Feb. 5, 2025), plaintiffs husband and wife filed an HCLA claim against defendant doctor and his medical practice based on their failure to timely diagnose the husband’s cancer. When the plaintiffs filed their initial complaint, they attached a certificate of good faith pursuant to the HCLA requirements.
While the suit was pending, the husband died. The wife continued as the plaintiff and filed a motion to amend her complaint. With the trial court’s permission, she filed an amended complaint that added a claim for wrongful death and added the husband’s death to the damages portion of the complaint. The defendants named in the amended complaint were the same.
Defendants moved to dismiss, arguing that the plaintiff’s failure to file a certificate of good faith with the amended complaint was fatal to her case. The trial court agreed, and the Court of Appeals affirmed dismissal.
Plaintiff argued that Tenn. Code Ann. § 29-26-122 did not require the filing of a new certificate of good faith here because the statute “seeks to confirm the good faith basis for the action, not the specific claims for damages that are alleged in the action.” The plaintiff asserted that the factual basis of both the first and the amended complaint were the same. The Court, however, disagreed that the first certificate of good faith was sufficient. The Court reviewed cases interpreting the certificate of good faith requirement, specifically noting that a new certificate of good faith has been required “when an amendment added new defendants to existing claims” and “when an amendment added new claims against existing defendants.”
The Court reasoned:
Here, Plaintiff asserted that already-alleged acts by the existing defendants caused a new injury. This implicates the language in § 29-26-115(a)(3), which requires a claimant to establish that “[a]s a proximate result of the defendant’s negligent act or omission, the plaintiff suffered injuries which would not otherwise have occurred.” Id. § 29-26- 115(a)(3).
We recognize this may seem like a harsh result, but compliance with § 29-26-122(a) is required and compliance in this case would not have been onerous. As Plaintiff repeatedly emphasizes in her appellate brief, the named defendants and alleged acts were the same in the Original Complaint and the First Amended Complaint. Thus, obtaining a new certificate of good faith would have simply required a qualified expert to confirm that Plaintiff had a good faith basis for alleging that the same acts by the same defendants proximately caused a different injury, Decedent’s death.
The Court thus affirmed the ruling that the plaintiff was required to filed a new certificate of good faith with her amended complaint.
The plaintiff also argued that the amended complaint did not supersede and replace the original complaint and that the original complaint should be allowed to stand. The Court rejected this argument, stating that it is a “long standing rule in Tennessee that an original complaint is superseded and its effect as a pleading destroyed by filing an amended complaint complete in itself.” (internal citation omitted).
Dismissal was therefore affirmed.
Judge Usman wrote a lengthy separate opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part. After reviewing both the good faith certificate statute and cases interpreting that statute, Judge Usman wrote that the statute does not specifically require that a new certificate of good faith be filed with an amended complaint. He agreed that, pursuant to the current precedent, the plaintiff was “not able to pursue her health care liability action to the extent of seeking to recover in relation to her husband’s death.” But Judge Usman wrote that he believed the plaintiff should be allowed to continue with the claims included in the original complaint, as the original certificate of good faith satisfied the statutory requirement for those claims.
This opinion was released 3.5 months after oral arguments in this case.