Free Tennessee Liability Waiver Form

Tennessee tore up its own waiver rulebook in December 2018. For the previous forty-one years the controlling authority had been Olson v. Molzen, which imported a six-item checklist from the California decision in Tunkl v. Regents, and for most of those years the Court of Appeals could not agree whether the checklist applied to anyone but licensed professionals. Copeland v. HealthSouth/Methodist Rehabilitation Hospital, LP, 565 S.W.3d 260 (Tenn. 2018), ended the argument by discarding the checklist, abolishing the professional-services limitation, and putting a three-factor balance in its place. Eight reported decisions fell in a single paragraph. If your release predates that opinion, it was drafted for a test this state no longer applies.

For businesses the headline is encouraging. Copeland confirmed that exculpatory provisions are not disfavored in Tennessee and that its public policy has historically favoured freedom of contract, which is not something every state's highest court says out loud. The catch is that the factor most likely to sink a release is the one entirely within your control: how clearly the document tells the signer what is being given up. What follows covers the three Copeland factors, the rule that a parent cannot waive a child's claim, the gross negligence ceiling, the electronic signing statute, and the edits to make to the downloadable Word template.

Read all of this as background only and not legal advice, because only a Tennessee lawyer who has seen your operation and your form can say whether it survives a Copeland analysis.

How Tennessee treats liability waivers

Frederick Copeland was seventy-seven, recovering from knee replacement surgery at a Memphis rehabilitation hospital, and needed to see his orthopedic surgeon. The hospital had contracted with a medical transportation company, whose driver handed him a two-sided sheet at the door: a run report on one face, and on the other a nine-paragraph transportation agreement containing three paragraphs of exculpatory language. He signed, went to the appointment, and fell off the van's running board on the way back. The driver had spent nineteen minutes at the hospital in total, fetching Mr. Copeland from his room, wheeling him out, loading his walker and getting the forms signed. Both lower courts enforced the release. The Supreme Court reversed and used the case to restate the law.

The restated test asks a court to consider the totality of the circumstances and weigh three non-exclusive factors, which need not carry equal weight. The first is relative bargaining power, measured chiefly by how important the service is to the signer's physical or economic wellbeing and how much free choice that person had to look elsewhere. Mr. Copeland failed that prong badly: he had not chosen or paid the company, the form came on a take-it-or-leave-it basis from a driver who could not have explained it and had no authority to change it, and refusing meant losing a medical appointment. The second factor is clarity of language. The third is public policy and the public interest, which the court called the hardest to articulate and approached by asking whether a party has a public service obligation like a utility, a common carrier or an innkeeper, whether the service is of a type generally thought suitable for public regulation, and whether it is a practical necessity.

Recreation businesses sit some distance from that danger zone, and Copeland said so. Mr. Copeland's trip was a medical necessity, and the court noted that this distinguished his case from those involving purely voluntary or recreational activities, which generally do not affect the public interest. It cited Maxwell v. Motorcycle Safety Foundation, Inc., 404 S.W.3d 469 (Tenn. Ct. App. 2013), where a release signed before a beginner motorcycle course was enforced against a student who crashed into a parked truck. The relationships where Tennessee releases actually fail are the ones with a real imbalance behind them: a physician's release in Olson, a residential lease in Crawford v. Buckner, 839 S.W.2d 754 (Tenn. 1992), and common carriers, which Copeland lists as unenforceable regardless of the wording. One warning about older research: Copeland overruled the recreation cases that rested on the professional-services limitation, including the whitewater rafting decision in Henderson v. Quest Expeditions and the horse-boarding decision in Thrasher v. Riverbend Stables, so quoting them today is a mistake.

Waivers signed for minors in Tennessee

The rule here is old, blunt and still good. In Childress v. Madison County, 777 S.W.2d 1 (Tenn. Ct. App. 1989), a twenty-year-old, non-verbal, severely disabled student was found at the bottom of a YMCA pool during a Special Olympics training session, after the teacher supervising him turned to watch another swimmer and no one scanned the water. His mother had signed the Tennessee Special Olympics parental and medical release form. The Court of Appeals held that a guardian may not waive the rights of an infant or an incompetent, that the mother could not execute a valid release or exculpatory clause as to her son's rights against anyone, and that the indemnity promise in the same form was void as well, because a parent who has made himself an indemnitor is, in the phrase the court borrowed, a dubious champion of the child's rights. The mother's own claim was dismissed, since she had plainly released that.

Businesses spent the next quarter-century hoping the rule had gone stale. It had not. In Blackwell v. Sky High Sports Nashville Operations, LLC, 523 S.W.3d 624 (Tenn. Ct. App. 2017), a mother signed a trampoline park's release for her son, who later tore a patellar tendon and broke a tibia during a trampoline dodgeball tournament. The park called Childress dated authority and pointed to a California forum-selection and choice-of-law clause in its own form. The Court of Appeals rejected both arguments, observed that under Supreme Court Rule 4 a reported Court of Appeals opinion is controlling authority until a competent court reverses it, and noted that the legislature and the Supreme Court had each had ample opportunity to change the rule and had not.

So the guardian block in your form does not do what many operators assume. It cannot stop the child's own negligence claim, and because that claim is tolled while the child is a minor, it can arrive years after the event. The block is still worth having: it records consent to participation, authorises emergency medical treatment, documents that the family was told the specific risks of your activity, and releases the parent's own claims, which in Blackwell included the pre-majority medical expenses the mother had paid. A teenager's own signature adds nothing, since a minor lacks capacity to be bound.

What the waiver must say to hold up in Tennessee

Copeland defines the clarity factor in four demands, and they make a usable drafting checklist. The language must clearly and unequivocally state the intent to be relieved from liability. It must be so clear and understandable that an ordinary and knowledgeable person will know what he or she is contracting away. It must alert the signer that the provision concerns a substantial right. And it must not be so broad as to relieve the exculpated party from liability for any injury for any reason. Ambiguity is construed against whoever drafted the document, which in practice means against you.

The fourth demand is the one that catches businesses, because the instinct when drafting a release is to reach for everything. Burks v. Belz-Wilson Properties, 958 S.W.2d 773 (Tenn. Ct. App. 1997), shows the cost. A real estate firm held a staff sports day at a Memphis sports complex, and an employee was paralysed attempting a back flip from a pommel horse into a gymnastics pit between scheduled events. He had signed a form headed RELEASE in bold capitals, releasing the sponsors from any and all liability claims, demands, actions or causes of action whatsoever arising out of any injury relating to participation in these events. The court found that phrase ambiguous, construed it against the drafter, and held it did not cover an injury outside the scheduled events, since the defendants' reading would extend the exculpation to unbounded limits. Copeland cites that passage twice.

Formatting alone will not rescue overbroad content. Much of the exculpatory language in the Copeland agreement appeared in bold print and all capital letters, and the court still found it unclear, partly because the carve-outs for gross negligence and wilful misconduct in two paragraphs opened with the words without limitation of the foregoing, and partly because a third paragraph carried no carve-out at all. A severability clause did not save it. No Tennessee statute prescribes a type size or a heading for a general release, and Adams v. Roark, 686 S.W.2d 73 (Tenn. 1985), confirms that failure to read a signed document does not affect its validity absent fraud or duress, though Childress cautions that notice of an exculpatory clause is still a prerequisite. Specific activities do carry prescribed text: section 44-20-105 requires the equine warning on signs in black letters at least one inch high and inside every written contract for instruction, professional services or the rental of an equine or equipment.

Gross negligence and what a Tennessee waiver cannot cover

No Tennessee release reaches past ordinary negligence, and the limit is not a modern invention. Copeland puts it first among the common principles it recognises: a party may not, for public policy reasons, exempt itself from liability for gross negligence, reckless conduct or intentional wrongdoing. Adams v. Roark traces the rule to an 1859 railroad case holding that it would be most absurd to suppose the parties intended a company to be protected against injury occasioned by its own wilful wrong or gross negligence.

Adams itself is the cautionary tale. Jake Adams raced at Cherokee Dragway and lost control of his motorcycle near the finish line, striking a steel photo-electric reflector with a quarter-inch metal blade projecting eighteen inches into the air. He had signed a document in capitals titled RELEASE AND WAIVER OF LIABILITY AND INDEMNITY AGREEMENT, with I HAVE READ THIS RELEASE embossed in red beside every signature line, and Tennessee even has a statute, section 55-22-103, expressly approving releases given by motor racing participants to promoters. None of that ended the case. Nine other experienced racers swore they had never been told a steel reflector was in use, and the Supreme Court held that this raised a genuine issue of gross negligence.

The standard is demanding, which is the only comfort available. Buckner v. Varner, 793 S.W.2d 939 (Tenn. Ct. App. 1990), enforced a one-sentence stable waiver against a rider thrown when a bridle broke, because nothing showed the owner had consciously supplied defective equipment, and defined gross negligence as a conscious neglect of duty or a callous indifference to consequences. Maxwell frames it as a two-step proof: ordinary negligence, then conduct showing utter unconcern for the safety of others. Draft accordingly. State that gross negligence, recklessness and intentional misconduct are excluded, put that carve-out in its own sentence rather than trailing behind words like without limitation of the foregoing, and remember that what defeats such a claim is a maintenance log and a training record, not a paragraph.

Electronic signatures in Tennessee

Chapter 10 of title 47 of the Tennessee Code may be cited as the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act. Section 47-10-107 supplies the operative rule in four short subsections: a record or signature may not be denied legal effect or enforceability solely because it is in electronic form; a contract may not be denied effect solely because an electronic record was used in its formation; an electronic record satisfies a law requiring a writing; and an electronic signature satisfies a law requiring a signature. Section 47-10-105 applies the chapter only between parties who have agreed to conduct the transaction by electronic means, an agreement found from the context and the parties' conduct. Section 47-10-109 attributes an electronic record or signature to a person if it was that person's act, provable in any manner, including the efficacy of a security procedure.

Validity is therefore not the interesting question in Tennessee; presentation is. Copeland weighed how little time Mr. Copeland had to read and comprehend the document he was handed, and the clarity factor asks what an ordinary person would understand from the words actually placed in front of the signer. On a screen that means giving the release its own headed block rather than burying it in a scroll, adding a checkbox or initials field beside it, sending the link before arrival so nobody signs on a phone while a class is starting, and keeping the agreement to sign electronically along with identity and timestamp data. Store the exact version that was displayed, because the document a Tennessee court will read is the one the participant saw.

How to use this form in Tennessee

Open the Word template and work through the square-bracket placeholders: your legal and trading names, the activity, the address, and Tennessee together with your county in the governing-law clause. Rewrite the risk list so it describes hazards your participants actually meet, since a generic list is the kind of unbounded language Burks refused to enforce. Confine the release to the activity and premises you named rather than to any and all claims of any kind, and keep the gross negligence exclusion as a standalone sentence. Leave the guardian block in for participants under eighteen, treating it as consent, medical authorisation and a release of the parent's own claims only. If horses are involved, post the one-inch black-letter warning from section 44-20-105 and copy the same wording into the contract. If you run a ski area, reference the assumption of risk that section 68-114-103 places on skiers and tramway passengers. Delete the note to the business, then send the result to a Tennessee attorney before a single participant signs it.

Moving the form online with Waiver.com carries the same structure across without flattening it. Each heading becomes its own block, the release keeps a block and an initials field to itself, participant and guardian fields sit where the signature lines were, and publishing creates a numbered version. Every signature is then stamped with the time and bound to the exact version displayed, which is the evidence you want when a Tennessee court asks what the signer could see and how long they had to read it.