Jay O’Keeffe has a written a great post called "10 Things I Wish I’d Known Before My First Oral Argument." An excerpt: 3. Anticipate hard questions. As soon as I start working on an appeal, I create a document called "Tough Questions." This document includes every hard question I can think of, regardless…
I received an unsolicited (but not unwanted) email from the Baker Donelson law firm titled "20 Ways Your Independent Contractor Might Be an Employee." The purpose of the email was to warn recipients about ongoing IRS employment tax audits in general and the worker classification issue (are workers employees or independent contractors) in particular. …
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…
Here is a tip that will improve the quality of your law practice and your life: look at the law first. Oh, things a different in the run of the mill auto case or other cases that you routinely handle. And it is different if you have recently handled a case that…
I argued a medical malpractice case before the Tennessee Court of Appeals today. Regular readers know that we prevailed in a med mal case in Maury County last year after a thirteen-day jury trial. The case has been resolved as to all defendants but one, the ER doctor, and it…
From time to time over the years there has been talk about imposing a sales tax on professional services. One cannot help but wonder whether there will be an effort to impose such a tax to help solve the budget problem facing our state government. Like all sales taxes, a…
Why should you care about the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Bell Atlantic Court v. Twombly , 127 S. Ct. 1955 (2007)? Because it changed the rules of pleading in federal court and, because Tennessee looks to interpretations of the federal rules to interpret its own similar rules, it…
Tennessee Rule of Civil Procedure 4.01(3) provides as follows: If a plaintiff or counsel for plaintiff (including third-party plaintiffs) intentionally causes delay of prompt issuance of a summons or prompt service of a summons, filing of the complaint (or third-party complaint) is ineffective. I don’t know what "prompt" means. Is…
A friend emailed me today to ask if the deadline for filing a transcipt on appeal had changed. It has. Effective July 1, TRAP 24 and 25 now require that a transcipt be filed within 60 days. The old rule gave court reporters 90 days to prepare the transcript. That…
Did you know that you can avoid the use of affidavits in federal court and use declarations instead? I confess that I did not until I read this post in What About Clients?, one of my favorite blogs. 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1746 "allows a federal court affiant or witness to prepare…