The TBA Tort & Insurance Law Section Executive Council has a monthly telephone conference, which is scheduled the second Tuesday of the month at 11:00 a.m.

The Council is responsible for developing the section's CLE program for the year, discussing and providing opinions on potential legislation that may be brought up during the legislative session, and producing news to the section.

If you are intested in joining the Executive Council, please contact me via email by Monday, August 31, 2015.  Please put TBA TORT & INSURANCE LAW SECTION EXECUTIVE COUNCIL in the Subject line of your email.  Your information will then be submitted to the Executive Council for review.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

We look forward to you joining the Executive Council!

Christy Gibson

TBA Tort & Insurance Law Section Coordinator

Known for his ability to explain complex tax concepts in clear and concrete terms, John Burns is a trusted advisor to closely held and family-owned businesses. Often serving as outside general counsel, John assists corporate clients with local, state and federal tax issues that impact day-to-day operations, business formation, governance, succession planning, and restructuring. John’s experience includes representing clients in tax controversies before the IRS, the Tennessee Department of Revenue and municipal assessors.

Business owners and executives, professional athletes, entertainers and other high-net-worth individuals also rely on John for estate planning advice and counsel, wealth transfer strategies and other sophisticated wealth management and asset protection initiatives. Amid constantly changing state and federal tax laws, John strives to give clients practical advice and peace of mind with respect to both their immediate challenges and their long-term objectives.

John McCann’s practice is focused on products liability defense matters in both federal and state courts. He regularly represents a wide variety of manufacturers, including particularly the manufacturers of medical devices and equipment, and pharmaceutical companies. Mr. McCann also represents trucking companies and other entities in the transportation industry in the defense of personal injury and accident cases. Prior to law school, Mr. McCann was a public accountant with both PricewaterhouseCoopers in Atlanta and Ernst & Young in Memphis.

Elizabeth has been with Disability Rights Tennessee, formerly Disability Law & Advocacy Center of TN, for six years serving dual roles as an attorney and the Intake Director. Elizabeth received her undergraduate degree in Psychology from Lipscomb University and her law degree from the Nashville School of Law. Elizabeth has been a volunteer with CASA Nashville for twelve years.  She is admitted to practice in Tennessee and the United States District Courts for the Middle and Eastern Districts of Tennessee. Elizabeth lives in Nashville with her husband and their two children.

Mo Syed graduated cum laude from the University of Rochester and obtained his law degree from the George Washington University Law School.  In 2007 he completed the Harvard Law School Program of Instruction for Lawyers (mediation workshop).

His past law experience includes several years in the antitrust and business disputes section of the law firm of King & Ballow with offices in Nashville, TN and La Jolla, CA.  Mr. Syed previously practiced litigation at Ashcraft & Gerel, LLP in Washington, D.C. with offices and active cases nationwide focusing on tort and complex civil disputes.  He has also worked for the Civil Litigation Branch of the District of Columbia Office of Attorney General (formerly D.C. Office of Corporation Counsel), as well as Rizvi, Isa, Afridi and Angell, a leading corporate law firm in Karachi, Pakistan.

Greg Grisham has over 25 years of successful experience counseling and representing employers in all aspects of workplace law in Tennessee and across the United States. Mr. Grisham has helped employers avoid charges and lawsuits with a focus on preventative practices. Preventative practices include counseling in situations involving discipline, termination, demotion, promotion and other workplace changes in the terms and conditions of employment, harassment investigations, wage and hour compliance, FMLA Compliance, Reasonable Accommodation assessment, supervisor training and review of employment policies and procedures.

Mr. Grisham has successfully litigated hundreds of administrative charges and employment lawsuits on behalf of employers, including federal and state law claims alleging discrimination, harassment, retaliation, wrongful termination, defamation, invasion of privacy, wage and hour violations and ERISA violations.  Mr. Grisham also represents employers before the National Labor Relations Board in unfair labor practice proceedings. He represents employers in the enforcement of post-employment restrictive covenants such as non-compete, non-solicitation and non-disclosure agreements and handles general civil litigation. Mr. Grisham’s practice also includes the defense of property owners and property management companies in federal and state Fair Housing charges and litigation. He also advises public Charter Schools in education and workplace compliance matters.

Mr. Grisham has extensive experience working with insurance carriers and their insureds in the defense of EPLI claims. He is a regular speaker at public seminars on workplace law issues and has authored numerous articles on a variety of employment law related topics.

The TBA Family Law Section Executive Council has a monthly telephone conference, which is scheduled the second Thursday of the month at 3:00 p.m.

The Council is responsible for developing the section's CLE program for the year, discussing and providing opinions on potential legislation that may be brought up during the legislative session, and producing news to the section.

If you are intested in joining the Executive Council, please contact me via email at cgibson@tba3.org by Monday, August 31, 2015.  Please put TBA FAMILY LAW SECTION EXECUTIVE COUNCIL in the Subject line of your email.  Your information will then be submitted to the Executive Council for review.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

We look forward to you joining the Executive Council!

Christy Gibson

TBA Family Law Section Coordinator

Chris L. Vlahos focuses his practice on entertainment, copyright and commercial litigation as well as other intellectual property matters.  Mr. Vlahos has represented recording artists, songwriters, record companies, music publishers, book publishers, telecommunications companies and other corporate and individual clients in various litigation matters, including the joint defense of hundreds of rap-sampling copyright infringement lawsuits brought simultaneously against major record and music publishing companies. 

Mr. Vlahos received his J.D. degree in 1999 from the University of Tennessee, where he graduated cum laude.  He graduated cum laude from the University of Tennessee in 1995, where he was Phi Beta Kappa, Whittle Scholar and National Merit Scholar, with a B.A. degree in English and a minor in German.  Mr. Vlahos previously served as Chair for the Tennessee Bar Association Entertainment and Sports Law Section and currently serves on the Executive Committee.

by Jackie Kittrell and Steve Shields

The Tennessee Supreme Court’s Access to Justice Commission was created in 2009 under the authority of TSC Rule 50 and has devoted itself and its advisory committees to helping people overcome the barriers to our justice system to resolve their legal problems[1].  Lack of access to justice has been primarily defined as a lack of affordable legal representation in court, so the focus is on how to improve the ability of self-represented litigants to move through the adversarial system.  This year, the Commission is exploring, through its Mediation Advisory Committee chaired by Gail Ashworth, ways in which the self-represented disputants can access justice by using appropriate mediation services.  Most of the Committee’s work is done by conference call each month or two, with Committee members agreeing to lead various projects approved by the whole[2].

Mediation helps people access the courts in Tennessee by helping them slow down, sit down, and engage in meaningful settlement talks with the person or entity on the other side of the dispute, whether or not attorneys are involved.  An increasing number of pro se cases are coming to General Sessions Courts, especially small claims in Civil Sessions Court and never-married parenting cases in Juvenile Court. In some counties, there are Community Mediation Centers to provide volunteer mediators to help pro se parties on the day of court or through an administrative process of screening and scheduling dueling parties.  Nashville, Knoxville, and a few rural counties can use these nonprofit services, either for free or on a sliding scale, although its unlikely any mediation center could completely fill this access gap.  It goes without saying that most counties in Tennessee do not have access to CMCs and their well trained staff and volunteer mediators, so must rely on private Rule 31 mediators to make themselves available for pro bono mediation[3].   

These county-funded Sessions courts deal with many, many unrepresented litigants, either because the amount in dispute is not enough to warrant hiring an attorney, or because the parties simply can’t afford any legal help and don’t qualify for legal aid.  (Unrepresented domestic disputants are widely seen as the most underserved of all pro se litigants, with the most visible docket jams and problematic legal consequences.) The court dockets can be large, with countless delays and stressed out parties.  Mediation, if done by well-trained mediators, and in such a way to assure safety and self-determination, is a huge benefit to any court. Docket management alone would make such a service worth its weight in gold; when client satisfaction and compliance with the agreement is considered, it’s worth its weight in platinum (titanium?).  The parties feel heard; they are given the safety, space and structure they need to make their own agreements; and all known outcome studies show that, at least with parenting disputes, the parties have higher compliance (and more child support payments) when following their own agreements when compared to following those orders resulting from adversarial litigation.

In 2014, Stephen Shields, an attorney mediator at Jackson, Shields, Yeiser & Holt in Memphis, and adjunct faculty at Memphis School of Law, presented an idea to the Tennessee General Sessions Judges Conference, asking if any judge would be interested in a “Mediator of the Day” program in their civil sessions court docket, modeled on a successful pro bono program developed by the Memphis Bar Association, and inspired by several CMC programs across the state.   In the Memphis model, Rule 31 mediators make themselves available for pro bono mediation on a specific day, go to the courthouse and wait for a case to be assigned.  The mediator then screens the parties, mediates the disputes, and memorializes the resulting agreement, which is signed by the parties.  The Memphis Bar Association DR Section provides training and mentoring (and allows non-attorney mediators to be members of the Section). 

The county Sessions Judges were interested and enthused about the possibilities, and Steve Shields got an immediate “yes” from eight counties across all three grand divisions.  The Mediation Committee approved further work.  Professor Becky Jacobs, the director of the Mediation Clinic at University of Tennessee College of Law in Knoxville, and Jackie Kittrell, the Executive Director of Community Mediation Center, also in Knoxville, both signed on to put together an action plan and see what might work in East Tennessee.  They both have experience in Knox County, training and supervising law students and community volunteers to mediate in county courts, a program that has existed for 20 years, with close to 800 referrals flowing through CMC each year.  Judge Dwight Stokes, one of two Sessions judges in Sevier County, and a leader in this effort to provide access to justice in Tennessee, is working with the Committee to explore what might work in his rural county court, with both the parenting/visitation docket and the civil small claims docket.

Linda Warren Seely, the Director of Pro Bono Projects at Memphis Area Legal Services (MALSI), has been involved in starting a mediator of the day program in Shelby County Juvenile Court, and will also be involved in recruitment of volunteer mediators.  She will be involved in helping train mediators on issues important in domestic violence screening.

Several Committee members will be involved in a short training for mediators who want to do pro bono work involving pro se parties, covering ethical and practical issues involved in handling those type of cases, such as intake and screening for domestic violence and need for legal advice; determining capacity to mediate; balancing power; use of forms and the ethics of scribing.

Given the differences in mediation resources in rural and urban counties, we will clearly need more than one model.  Mediators from across the state have expressed a willingness to do pro bono. There have been meetings with several Sessions judges who would like to have a list of mediators who could do pro bono work, and some good ideas have been generated and some mediations have been done so we can all see what might work best.  Some examples: 

·      Mediators could individually contact judges or court staff to begin talking about what the highest priority of need is, and to offer their service;

·      Mediators could approach existing volunteer mediation programs[4] in their region to volunteer, or to seek help with training and mentoring;

·      Bar associations could be involved, as in Memphis, helping organize leadership and recruitment;

·      The court and mediators could organize a “mediator of the day” or “docket day” event where on a specific day, or a sequence of days, mediators would know to come to the courthouse and get ready to mediate whatever cases the judge sent to them.

Jackie Kittrell is updating the content on the TBA Dispute Resolution Section website and wants section members to email in any webpage links and articles they would like to be included in the mix.  Members can do this at any time by emailing Jackie and cc’ing Christy Gibson.