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Goot v. Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County11/9/2005
yment agreement with its employees, had an obligation to fully inform its employees of their rights and status with regard to the waiver of premium benefit.
The surviving spouses have presented evidence that calls into question whether the Metropolitan Government has acted reasonably in discharging its contractual obligation to inform its employees of the waiver of premium benefit. Even though the group life insurance policy has been in place since 1965, there is evidence that prior to 1992, the Metropolitan Government either failed to inform disabled employees of the existence of this benefit or misinformed the employees who asked about it. While there is some evidence that the Metropolitan Government was informing disability retirees of the existence of this benefit in 1996, general notice of this benefit was not given until the publication of ME News in July 2001. This evidence is sufficient to create an issue for the jury regarding whether the Metropolitan Government has breached its duty to notify its employees of their benefits as well as its duty of good faith and fair dealing.
B.
The Metropolitan Government asserts that Ms. Jackson's breach of contract claim is time-barred because she failed to file her complaint withing six years after the purported breach of the contract in 1987 when it failed to inform her spouse of the existence of the waiver of premium benefit. Ms. Jackson concedes that the six-year statute of limitations in Tenn. Code Ann. ยง 28-3-109(a)(3) applies. However, she insists that the discovery rule should apply and that if it does, her complaint is timely because she filed it withing six years after discovering that her husband would have been entitled to the waiver of premium benefit had the Metropolitan Government explained it to him when he took disability retirement in 1987. The trial court concluded that Ms. Jackson's complaint was time-barred, and thus we must determine whether the discovery rule may be invoked with regard to Ms. Jackson's breach of contract claim.
1.
The discovery rule is a limited exception to the statute of limitations. Pero's Steak & Spaghetti House v. Lee, 90 S.W.3d 614, 621 (Tenn. 2002) (characterizing the discovery rule as an "equitable exception" to the statute of limitations). It tolls the running of the statute of limitations until the plaintiff knows or, in the exercise of reasonable care and diligence, should know that the plaintiff has a legal cause of action against the defendant. Terry v. Niblack, 979 S.W.2d 583, 586 (Tenn. 1998); Hunter v. Brown, 955 S.W.2d 49, 51 (Tenn. 1997).
The rationale underlying the discovery rule is that injured parties should not be placed in the anomalous situation of being required to file suit before they know they have been injured. McCroskey v. Bryant Air Conditioning Co., 524 S.W.2d 487, 490 (Tenn. 1975); Teeters v. Currey, 518 S.W.2d 512, 515 (Tenn. 1974). The rule alleviates the intolerable result of barring a cause of action by holding that it "accrued" before the plaintiff discovered the injury or the wrong. Foster v. Harris, 633 S.W.2d 304, 305 (Tenn. 1982). However, the rule applies only in cases where the plaintiff did not discover and reasonably could not have been expected to discover the existence of a right of action, Hunter v. Brown, 955 S.W.2d at 51, and it tolls the running of the statute of limitations only as long as the plaintiff has no knowledge at all that a wrong has occurred and, as a reasonable person, would not have been put on inquiry. Potts v. Celotex Corp., 796 S.W.2d 678, 680 (Tenn. 1990).
The discovery rule was first invoked by the Tennessee Supreme Court over thirty years ago in a medical malpractice
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