The Supreme Court’s pilot project to provide an avenue for complex business cases has continued to see great interest from litigants.
The business litigation pilot project has already exceeded case filing expectations, which confirms that this specialized docket is needed in Tennessee. In the first six months of operation, 28 cases were granted requests for the Tennessee business court docket, as compared with Georgia, which had 25 new cases filed in its multi-judge business court during all of 2014. In addition, business litigants are seeing their cases resolved expeditiously. On the new business docket, six cases have been resolved and the time to finalize them ranged from between 30 days to just 164 days. In Georgia, the average time of resolution is 608 days.
“Although it’s still early in the process, these preliminary reports underscore that this specialized docket is meeting the litigation needs of the business and legal community and that our case management plan is working,” said Chief Justice Sharon G. Lee. "We appreciate Davidson County Chancery Court being willing to serve as the pilot for this innovation in our ongoing efforts to streamline the judiciary."
The statewide advisory commission met recently to review statistics, hear a six-month update, and lay the groundwork for continuous improvement for litigants, which are primarily business and corporate entities.
The commission has already created a survey for parties with cases that have concluded in the court. The commission is currently examining the case eligibility criteria for the business docket to ensure that it encompasses all cases that would benefit from a specialized forum.
“I applaud the quick work of the commission in developing an experience survey for parties and their counsel that have had cases come to resolution,” said commission chair Neal McBrayer, a judge on the Court of Appeals. “This feedback will be essential as we work to meet the unique needs of litigants in business cases.”
Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Lyle and her staff have disposed of six cases already. The cases filed have involved trade secrets, shareholder rights, accounting fraud, and multiple types of contract cases.
The commission plans to continue to work throughout 2016 and will make recommendations to the Supreme Court on business court processes and procedures. The members of the Advisory commission are:
Judge Neal McBrayer, Chairperson
Court of Appeals, Middle Section
Nashville
Scott Carey
Baker Donelson
Nashville
Jef Feibelman
Burch, Porter & Johnson PLLC
Memphis
David A. Golden
Eastman Chemical Company
Kingsport
Celeste H. Herbert
Jones, Meadows & Wall
Knoxville
Pat Moskal
Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP
Nashville
Bill Tate
Howard Tate Sowell Wilson Leathers & Johnson, PLLC
Nashville
Charles Tuggle
First Horizon National Corporation
Memphis
Tim Warnock
Riley Warnock & Jacobson
Nashville
Read more about the project here: www.tncourts.gov/bizcourt