We’ve talked about this before: Tennessee is a great, creditor-friendly state, but, if you want to recover your attorney’s fees in Tennessee, you’d better have some very specific language in your contract.
The Tennessee Court of Appeals filed an opinion last week as a reminder, at Nyrstar Tennessee Mines-Strawberry Plains, LLC v. Claiborne Hauing, LLC, Tenn. Ct. Apps, No. E2017-00155-COA-R3-CV.
Here is the contract provision the Court considered:
The Customer must pay Nyrstar all costs and expenses incurred by Nyrstar in connection with enforcing its rights against the Customer under an Agreement including legal expenses and other costs incurred in recovering monies owed by the Customer to Nyrstar.
By my read, “all costs and expenses,” along with “including legal expenses,” should be good enough.
The Nystar Court disagreed. That text does not say “including reasonable attorney’s fees.”
As a result, “The provision at issue does not specifically or expressly create a right to ‘fees,’ ‘attorney’s fees,’ or ‘reasonable attorney’s fees.'” Further, ““the term ‘expenses,’ without more, . . . does not include an award of attorney fees.”
As a result, “[t]he language in the contract before us is not sufficient for Nyrstar to be entitled to recover its attorney’s fees. The provision at issue does not expressly or specifically create a right for Nyrstar to recover its attorney’s fees.”
So, if you want to recover attorney’s fees in Tennessee, you’d better say exactly that in your contract–that the prevailing party shall be entitled to recover its attorney’s fees.
Creditors Rights 101 