Court Rulings

A subcontractor sought statutory penalties against a prime contractor based on the contractor's failure to comply with the Prompt Pay Act's requirement that any retainage withheld be deposited into an interest-bearing escrow account as set forth in Tenn. Code Ann. § 66-34-104(a). The prime contractor moved to dismiss the complaint, asserting that the claim was barred by the one-year statute of limitations applicable to statutory penalties, Tenn. Code Ann. § 28-3-104(a)(1)(C). The trial court granted the prime contractor's motion and dismissed the complaint. On appeal, we hold that the discovery rule applies to this type of claim for statutory penalties under the Prompt Pay Act and remand for further proceedings.

Unemployment benefits ambiguous employee statements or actions statutory meaning of left work

This is the second time this dispute has been before this court. The appeal arises from a violation of Tenn. Code Ann. § 36-4-106(d)(2), which prohibits a divorcing party from "canceling, modifying, terminating, assigning, or allowing the lapse" of any insurance policy that provides coverage to either spouse or their children without the consent of the other spouse, a court order, or abatement of the action. In this case, the wife modified her life insurance policy by replacing her husband with her mother as the sole beneficiary of the policy during the pendency of a divorce action and without the husband's consent or a court order. The wife died one week later, which caused an abatement of the divorce action. After the insurance company remitted the proceeds of approximately $393,000 to the wife's mother, the husband commenced this action to recover the proceeds. Following the first trial, the trial court found the wife intended to remove the husband and substitute their minor child as the insurance beneficiary, and it awarded the proceeds to the child. Both parties appealed. In the first appeal, we reversed the trial court and, after applying an equitable-balancing test, awarded the proceeds to the husband. See Coleman v. Olson, No. M2015-00823-COA-R3-CV, 2016 WL 6135395, at 15 (Tenn. Ct. App. Oct. 20, 2016) [hereinafter Coleman I]. The Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed our use of an equitable-balancing test but determined there was insufficient evidence to decide the merits on appeal. Coleman v. Olson, 551 S.W.3d 686, 697 (Tenn. 2018) [hereinafter Coleman II]. Thus, the Supreme Court remanded the case to the trial court with instructions to hear additional evidence and, after considering the equities of the parties, "remedy the violation of the statutory injunction by awarding all or a portion of the life insurance benefits to either or both parties." Id. at 688. However, the Court did not identify the equitable factors to consider. Following an evidentiary hearin

Unemployment benefits ambiguous employee statements or actions statutory meaning of left work

The plaintiff bank, M Co., sought to foreclose a mortgage on certain real property owned by the defendants J and L. At trial, the court denied the motion for judgment filed by J and L, which was based on their claim that M Co. failed to make out a prima facie case because a condition precedent to foreclosure, namely, notice of default prior to acceleration, had not been proven. The trial court rendered a judgment of foreclosure by sale, from which J and L appealed to this court. Held: 1. J and L could not prevail on their claim that M Co. lacked standing, which was based on their claim that M Co. failed to establish that it was the holder of the note when it commenced the present action: M Co.'s production of the original note at trial, as well as the admission into evidence of the copy of the note through H, a litigation manager for B Co., the subservicer for the loan securing M Co.'s mortgage to J and L's property, raised a presumption that M Co. was the holder of the note, and it then became the burden of J and L to rebut that presumption in order to challenge M Co.'s right to enforce the note, which they failed to do; moreover, even though J and L claimed that the court improperly admitted into evidence the routing history of the loan, that evidence was not necessary to prove that M Co. was a holder of the note, as M Co. produced the note, which was endorsed in blank, and, thus, the challenge by J and L to the admission of the routing history, even if valid, did not rebut the presumption that M Co. owned the debt when this action commenced. 2. The trial court improperly concluded that M Co. proved its prima facie foreclosure case: even though J and L could not prevail on their claim that M Co. did not demonstrate that it was the owner of the debt, M Co. did not prove that all conditions precedent to foreclosure, as established by the note and mortgage, had been satisfied, specifically, M Co. did not demonstrate that it provided J and L with notice of default, as