Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post explaining that, under Tenn. R. Civ. P. 3, just because you filed a timely lawsuit, doesn’t mean that you don’t have statute of limitations issues–you have to also accomplish prompt and timely service of process.
Recently, the Tennessee Court Appeals re-visited that issue in Kimberly Urban v. Robin Nichols, and it came to the same conclusion. In the Urban case, the Plaintiff filed the lawsuit within the one year statute of limitations, but the Plaintiff delayed in obtaining valid service of process and, worse, delayed in correcting her defective efforts to obtain service. The Court found that the ineffective service, followed by the long delay in correcting the service, failed to prevent the statute of limitations from expiring. Accordingly, the Court dismissed the lawsuit.
But, basically, that’s the same law as the blog post from April, right? Yes, but what I found interesting about this new case is that, if the Plaintiff had been diligent about correcting the ineffective service of process, the Court would have cut her some slack.
In fact, the Court said she could have amended her Complaint under Rule 15 to correct the defective name of one of the defendants or she could have issued new summons. If she had made any of these corrective efforts in a timely fashion, the Court suggests, the case would not have been dismissed on the technicalities, since Tennessee law and policy favor litigants to amend their pleadings to have disputes resolved on the merits.
So, the moral of the story may be: If you make a technical error, act fast in getting it fixed or at least brought before the Court.
Creditors Rights 101 