Day on Torts
BirdDog Law offers a large variety of free information to Tennessee lawyers and paralegals. Among the free resources are 95 databases, one for each Tennessee county, that share information about the operation of the court system in that county. Each database is set up in the same format for ease of use.
For example, click on the link for Sumner County. The opening page will give you population and demographic information for the county. The “Court Clerks and Related Information” has contact information for each court clerk, the clerks’ websites, the local rules of court, e-filing information, docket information, and filing fee information for all six courts.
The “Judges” tab has biographical and contact information for all eight judges in the county.
The “Local Forms” tab will direct you to any forms created for use in the courts of Sumner County.
The “Court Statistics” tab will allow you to see trial court filings and dispositions in the county for the most year for which such data has been published. Also included in “Court Statistics” is information about tort trials and their outcomes in the county. A glance will let you see that fiscal year ending June 30, 2021 (the most recent year for which data is available) 202 tort cases were closed in Sumner County but only eight of those cases were tried. Of the eight trials in tort cases only two were tried to a jury; the rest were non-jury trials. Of the cases that were tried, damages were not awarded in a single case. In other words, of the eight tort cases that went to trial in Sumner County in the twelve-month period ending June 30, 2021, the plaintiff lost every single one of them.
There is five years of data publicly available in the Sumner County database. In the five years ending June 30, 2021, a plaintiff was awarded damages in only three of fifty-eight trials in Sumner County. The total damages awarded in those three cases was $242,486.
As indicated above, this information is available for each of Tennessee’s 95 counties. To access these databases, go to BirdDogLaw.com, click on Free Resources, and then click on “Court and Other Information for Each of Tennessee’s 95 Counties.” Counties are listed in alphabetical order.