Articles
Short, practical writing on commercial leasing, TREC matters, real estate disputes, and the industry issues that sit underneath them.
Featured · Real Estate Disputes
A neighbor's fence or shed over the line does not quietly transfer your land in Tennessee — and a long-used driveway can raise an easement question even when ownership isn't in play. Here's how boundary disputes actually work: surveys, Tennessee's several adverse-possession rules, prescriptive easements, and the options for resolving one.
Business Formation
Selling a stake in your LLC to passive investors is usually a securities transaction, even in a small company. Here's the plain-language version of what that means — exemptions, filings, and the documents that protect both founders and investors.
Real Estate Disputes
If you own property with someone else and can no longer agree on what to do with it, either of you can force the issue through a partition action. Here is how partition works in Tennessee, and the significant change the legislature made in 2022 for inherited family land.
Brokerage Risk
In most Tennessee broker complaints I review, the fight has stopped being about the allegation and become about the file — what the transaction records, disclosures, communications, and money trail can actually prove.
Brokerage Risk
A commission dispute can look like a simple fight over who gets paid. In my experience the harder ones sit inside a larger problem — agency documents, disclosure, authority, and how the transaction was actually run.
Brokerage Risk
The same set of facts in a Tennessee real-estate dispute can open two doors at once: a regulatory complaint and a private civil claim. They run on different tracks, and I have watched people assume the two move together when they do not.
Owner Disputes
Real deadlock in an LLC rarely announces itself. Long before anything collapses in the open, I see it in stalled approvals, fights over the bank account and the records, and conflicting claims about who actually holds authority.
Owner Disputes
A lot of the owner disputes that cross my desk start the same way: the operating agreement says one thing, and the business has drifted into something else. That gap becomes a control and proof problem long before anyone files anything.
Owner Disputes
When an owner suddenly cannot get to the books, it gets written off as a bookkeeping headache. I treat it as an early control problem — about status, authority, and who gets to define the company's own record.
Brokerage Risk
Most brokerage complaints are helped or hurt long before anyone reaches the merits — by how the documentation is handled, what the parties expect, and whether they understand what the regulatory process can actually do.
Commercial Leasing
A default notice on a commercial lease can move several things at once — cure rights, termination risk, guaranty exposure, and the damages argument later. The first question I ask is the one people tend to skip: what does the lease actually say?
Commercial Leasing
Most lease fights I am brought into trace back to a few provisions the business team moved past too quickly — the exact terms that end up controlling the leverage later.
Commercial Leasing
An LOI is short on purpose, but most of the economic deal gets set there, and the lease that follows mostly builds around it.
Commercial Leasing
A CAM reconciliation dispute is a lease-interpretation problem with an accounting problem attached. Before anyone argues about the number, the question is what the lease lets the landlord pass through and what it lets the tenant check.
Brokerage Risk
Tennessee does not let agency be implied. Without a written agreement, a licensee is a facilitator, and the disclosure rules turn on timing and signatures. When a transaction is disputed, those details often decide the question of who represented whom.
Real Estate Disputes
Earnest money fights are usually smaller than the deal that failed, but they follow their own rules. The contract decides who is entitled to the deposit, and TREC's rules limit what a broker holding it can do in the meantime.
Brokerage Risk
Property management money moves every month: rents in, owner draws out, deposits held for the life of a lease. The money behind each of those movements is trust money while the firm holds it, and the principal broker is responsible for all of it.
Real Estate Disputes
Tennessee's disclosure law is built around actual knowledge, not investigation. Sellers disclose what they know, licensees disclose adverse facts they know, and buyers are expected to inspect. The disputes live in the gaps between those three.
Expert Witness
In Tennessee state court, expert disclosure works through interrogatories and depositions rather than a mandatory written report. That leaves the scheduling order, the supplementation duty, and the quality of the disclosure doing most of the work.
Brokerage Risk
The first mistake after a TREC complaint lands is the rush to respond — before the record, the timeline, and the real business risk have been organized.
Brokerage Risk
A TREC complaint is not a lawsuit, and confusing the two leads people to the wrong strategy. Knowing what the Commission can and cannot do is the first step to classifying the problem correctly.
Owner Disputes
Owner disputes almost always send up warning signs before the business actually stalls. The hard part is reading them early enough to do something useful about them.
Strategic Case Assessment
Not every serious dispute should run straight to a demand letter. Often the most valuable work I do comes first — figuring out what actually matters, who is really involved, and what the next move needs to accomplish.
Courthouse Guides
Everything you need for a court date at the Sumner County Courthouse, 155 East Main Street, Gallatin: hours, phone numbers, parking, the official dress code and security rules, which floor each court is on, and links to case search, payments, and jury information.
Courthouse Guides
For a civil court date in Davidson County: which building hears your case, clerk offices and phone numbers, where to park, what security will and will not let through, the published dress codes, jury duty, and links to case search and local rules.
Courthouse Guides
The Williamson County Judicial Center at 135 4th Avenue South, Franklin, houses the county's Circuit, Chancery, and General Sessions civil courts and their clerks. Hours, phone numbers, garage parking, the jury office's dress rules, and how filing works.
Courthouse Guides
Wilson County's civil courts are split between the Judicial Center at 134 South College Street and the General Sessions court at 115 East High Street in Lebanon. Which building hears your case, clerk hours and phones, the Chancery rules on phones and dress, and jury contacts.
Courthouse Guides
Circuit Court and jury duty are at the historic Robertson County Courthouse, 501 South Main Street, Springfield. General Sessions civil cases and detainers are filed with the clerk at 529 South Brown Street. Clerk phones and hours, free parking lots, the device ban, dress code, and jury rules.
Courthouse Guides
Macon County's court clerks are at the Justice Center on the Highway 52 Bypass East in Lafayette; Trousdale County's are at the Justice Center, 303 East Main Street, Hartsville. Addresses, phone numbers, what each county publishes, and what to confirm by phone.
