TBA President Jim Barry shares his thoughts on how to attain work/life balance and attorney wellness.

This installment of The Legal Life contains a legislative update, including information about TBA's grassroots advocacy efforts, especially around funding for indigent representation, staffing news, and more!

Read about the lawyers who have recently been reinstated, disbarred, suspended, censured or transferred their licenses to disability inactive status.

Tennessee Bar Association members who have died recently are memorialized.

A high number of civil appeals are dismissed because an appeal as of right was not permissible due to the lack of a final judgment. While some dismissed appeals involve pro se litigants, many involve litigants who are represented by counsel. In some cases, certain claims remain unresolved by the trial court that prevent an appeal as of right from being taken due to the lack of a final judgment; in others, the assertion of an exception to the final judgment rule is unsuccessful. Laura Kidwell brings readers this timely primer on the final judgment rule — and its exceptions — in Tennessee civil actions.

Former editor of the Tennessee Bar Journal Suzanne Craig Robertson gathered memories from TBA staff and past presidents, as well as bar association colleagues, to send Assistant Executive Director Barry Kolar off to retirement in style. Thanks for the more than two decades of leadership, Barry.

One of the most stressful things about the practice of law is that there are too many ways you can make mistakes and ruin a good issue. In this installment of Crime & Punishment, Wade Davies takes a look at an argument about waiver of a constitutional issues. Does a defendant have to provide notice to the Tennessee attorney general in Nashville before proceeding with a claim challenging the constitutionality of a statute?

Enjoy this spring poem from Billy Collins.

Hundreds of Knoxville community members, including state and local leaders, recently honored civil rights leader Robert J. Booker at the Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church in Knoxville, reports Knox News. Booker died Feb. 22 at age 88. Booker was remembered as a leader of the Knoxville Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and Knoxville’s first Black state representative. “He was a revolutionary,” said Knox County Commissioner Dasha Lundy. “If he didn’t have that spirit in him, Knoxville wouldn’t be what it is today.”

This is a termination of parental rights case. Appellant/Mother appeals the trial court’s termination of her parental rights on the grounds of: (1) abandonment by failure to support; (2) persistence of the conditions that led to the children’s removal; and (3) failure to manifest an ability and willingness to assume legal and physical custody of or financial responsibility for the children. The trial court also determined that termination of Mother’s parental rights is in the children’s best interests. Discerning no error, we affirm.