Nashville club owner Joshua Smith this week pleaded guilty to illegally funneling $67,000 from a campaign committee to a national political organization in a conspiracy to benefit state Sen. Brian Kelsey’s failed 2016 Congressional campaign, the Nashville Post reports. Smith, who owns The Standard in Nashville, is scheduled to be sentenced in June. He faces a maximum of five years in prison. Kelsey is not seeking reelection to his Senate seat and is scheduled to go to trial in January on the federal charges.

A federal appeals court panel in Cincinnati on Wednesday heard oral arguments in a case to determine whether an official at Tennessee’s Board of Professional Responsibility should be able to avoid a lawsuit by a lawyer who says his termination for tweeting about Muslims violated his First Amendment rights. Bloomberg Law reports that the appeal challenges a federal district judge’s decision that granted quasi-judicial immunity to the BPR’s Sandra Garrett, who had fired attorney Jerry Morgan following complaints about his anti-Muslim posts.

Nashville law firm Branstetter, Stranch & Jennings PLLC has opened an office in St. Louis with former circuit court judge, alderman and city prosecuting attorney John “Jack” Garvey at its head. Garvey’s daughter, Colleen Garvey, will also join the practice, which BS&J managing partner Gerard Stranch said he expects to grow to four or five attorneys within the next couple of years. “We see that there's a huge demand for legal services in St. Louis for the type of stuff that we do,” Stranch told the Nashville Business Journal. “With Jack being there, it's someone you can trust and someone you know who is going to do a good job."

The squabble over the Hamilton County Attorney position continued this week, with both County Mayor Weston Wamp and commissioners standing by their positions, the Chattanoogan reports. Wamp says that County Attorney Rheubin Taylor is no longer on the county payroll and his county email is blocked, while commissioners passed a series of resolutions in support of the embattled attorney and hired outside counsel. "The dizzying actions taken by the County Commission were not within what state law allows,” Wamp said, adding that he would not deal with Taylor or with the three remaining attorneys in the office. He said he plans to hire his own attorney.

What presumptions are common in workers’ compensation cases? Judge Brian Addington lays out the most common ones in his recent post to the From the Bench Blog presented by the Tennessee Court of Workers’ Compensation Claims. Among the most common: the opinion of the panel physician is presumed correct on the issue of causation; an employee is conclusively presumed to be at maximum medical improvement when the treating physician ends all active treatment; and a surviving spouse who was living with the deceased spouse before his or her death, and children under 16, are conclusively presumed to be wholly dependent. Read about other common presumptions and how the court might handle interplay between presumptions in Addington’s post.

Black law school students lag far behind their white counterparts when it comes to landing jobs after graduation, according to a new report from the National Association for Law Placement. Within 10 months of graduation, just two-thirds of Black graduates had secured jobs that required passage of the bar exam, as compared to 81% of white law grads, Reuters reports. NALP’s report also notes disparities in median pay and federal clerkships. NALP Executive Director Jim Leipold summed up the report’s findings, “We see huge gaps in bar passage by race and ethnicity. We see huge gaps in employment opportunities by race and ethnicity. We see huge gaps in progression through the associate ranks to partner by race, ethnicity and gender.”

The Shelby County District Attorney General’s Office has hired veteran defense attorney Lorna McClusky to head the office’s new conviction review unit, Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy announced yesterday. The new unit, the Post-Conviction Justice Unit, will review prior cases for possible errors and false convictions. The unit also will examine sentences that have already been handed down to assess whether or not those sentences were appropriate, taking into account changes in the law. McClusky graduated from the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law in 1994. In 1998, she became a member of the Massey McClusky Law Firm, where she rose to managing partner. She has nearly three decades of experience practicing criminal law, including extensive work on capital cases. Mulroy also recently named four new working groups for the office: Disproportionate Minority Contact, Post-Conviction Justice, Restorative Justice and Juvenile Justice. Read about the individuals who will lead these efforts from patch.com.

YLD board members Libba Fyke, Halle Priester and Dominique Winfrey today returned to their alma mater, The University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphrey's School of Law, to meet with students and discuss the benefits of getting involved in the TBA and its Young Lawyers Division. Students also had the opportunity to network and increase their professional knowledge as part of the free membership package provided to Tennessee law students. In addition, during today's visit the students had a chance to learn about the TBA's Diversity Leadership Institute, a six-month leadership and mentoring program for Tennessee law students in their second, third or fourth years of study. 

Michael Reed, who lost his wife and two daughters in the 2016 Gatlinburg wildfire, on Thursday filed a malpractice suit against the attorneys who represented him in his federal case against the National Park Service, the Knoxville News Sentinel reports. Reed’s new suit alleges attorneys Sidney Gilreath and Gordon Ball were unfamiliar with and did not follow the process for filing a Federal Torts Claims Act and failed to file pertinent documents with the court. Reed’s new attorney, David Randolph Smith, argues the original lawsuit would have been successful if the paperwork had been completed correctly. Reed sued the National Park Service for failing to warn people about the incoming flames against the park's policy. In the new suit, Reed is seeking $13.5 million in damages as well as other costs.

New Nashville Judge Lynne Ingram is facing accusations from a former client that she rushed through her last trial as an attorney, the Nashville Post reports. The former client, Dr. Hau La, was convicted on 11 counts of distribution of a controlled substance during a July trial. By then, Ingram had won the May 3 Democratic primary and, since there were no Republican contenders, effectively won her seat on the Davidson County Circuit Court. Ingram removed herself from the case immediately after the trial because she was “preparing to take the bench …” La filed a motion for a new trial on Friday, alleging Ingram and co-counsel Bryna Grant should never have brought the case to trial so quickly and that the pair never interviewed key government witnesses or reviewed the government’s discovery evidence “in any meaningful way.” The motion also claims the defense team’s own expert witness told Ingram and Grant they were unprepared and should seek a continuance.