Slip & Fall Lawyer in Tennessee

Tennessee's statute of limitations for premises liability claims is one year from the date of injury under T.C.A. § 28-3-104(a)(1)(A) — the shortest in the country. There is no grace period for late-discovered injuries, no equitable tolling for ongoing treatment, and no special extension for premises cases. The narrow § 28-3-104(a)(2) extension to two years applies only when criminal charges are brought against the at-fault party within the first year. For a slip-and-fall victim with a broken hip or a traumatic brain injury, twelve months passes before the full scope of the injury is even clear. The medical documentation, liability investigation, and demand must all happen within that window.

Tennessee retains the traditional common-law landowner duty framework. The invitee/licensee/trespasser classifications are intact under Hudson v. Gaitan (675 S.W.2d 699, Tenn. 1984) and Rice v. Sabir (979 S.W.2d 305, Tenn. 1998). As an invitee — a shopper in a grocery store, a guest at a hotel, a patient at a medical office — you are owed the highest duty: reasonable care to discover and correct dangerous conditions. As a licensee — a social guest, a person entering for their own purpose with the owner's permission — you are owed only disclosure of known hidden dangers. These classifications matter because they set the ceiling on the owner's obligation before any negligence analysis begins.

Tennessee follows the modern majority rule rejecting an absolute open-and-obvious bar. Unlike Oklahoma, where an obvious hazard eliminates the landowner's duty entirely, Tennessee treats obviousness as a factor in the plaintiff's comparative fault under McIntyre v. Balentine — not as a negation of duty. But Tennessee's strict 50% bar means that if obviousness and other fault factors push the plaintiff to 50% or more, recovery is eliminated. The practical effect is similar to an absolute bar in cases where the hazard was clearly visible, but the doctrinal difference preserves the plaintiff's claim as a jury question rather than a court ruling on duty.

If the fall occurred on government property, the Tennessee Governmental Tort Liability Act (GTLA) at T.C.A. § 29-20-101 et seq. governs. The GTLA imposes a 12-month limitations period under § 29-20-305(b) — which runs concurrently with the general one-year PI SOL, creating no additional urgency on deadline but layering additional obstacles: the GTLA caps recoverable damages and limits the categories of claims that can be brought against state and local entities. Tennessee's continuing storm doctrine for snow and ice is case-law derived: landowners generally have no duty to remove snow and ice while a storm is in progress but must take reasonable action after conditions clear.