'I’m Trying to Fix Things’

Even the dog in the courtroom was on Carey Acerra’s side.

For reasons unknown, when her opposing counsel spoke during the five-week trial in 2016, a rescue dog the judge adopted—a small black shih tzu with a graying muzzle—would often bark.
And each time the canine interjected, Acerra, who was representing the family of a dementia patient fatally neglected at a Memphis nursing home, said, “See? Even the dog is objecting.” It helped lighten the mood. The jurors visibly relaxed.

“Whenever things got really tense on the other side, because it was clear that the defense was not having fun, we took the opportunity to smile and be nice and make offers for everybody to take a break when it seemed appropriate—and just tried to read the room,” says Acerra, 49, a personal injury attorney who fights nursing home abuse and neglect at Jehl Law Group in Memphis. “We tried to be considerate and kind.”

She adds: “When you have to have everybody’s attention for that amount of time, you cannot be really serious the whole time. My best advice to any lawyer, particularly a plaintiff lawyer, is just be your authentic self. I’m a pretty glass-half-full kind of person, so if anything would go wrong, we’d just kind of brush it off, and laugh and go, ‘Sorry about that,’ and move on.”

She read the room well; the jury awarded her client $30 million. It was the first verdict against an individual nursing home owner in the country. “We pierced that corporate veil and proved that the companies [the owners] had created were really just shells,” says Acerra, who worked the case for eight years before trial. “I had a huge personal ownership in that case.”

In spite of her numerous health care liability wins, and her accomplishments as immediate past president of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association, Acerra admits, “I’ve probably had imposter syndrome for most of my life. It’s been quite a hurdle for me to get over all that and be able to talk about myself.”

Cameron Jehl, who left Wilkes & McHugh in 2013 to start a firm with Acerra, has worked with her on thousands of cases. “Carey has the patience of a saint,” he says. “She is always kind and thoughtful of our clients and considerate to opposing counsel. … She is a joy to be around.”

The daughter of musically talented parents—during the day, her dad sold auto parts, while her mom was a legal secretary—Acerra aspired to be a symphony conductor when she was a kid. Then, while a teen, she worked as a runner, secretary and receptionist alongside her mom. “I just thought it was so cool being around trial lawyers,” Acerra says. “They could fix problems for people.”

Acerra put herself through college by waiting tables, bartending and handling administrative tasks for attorneys at several firms, then spent four years as a paralegal—“so I could figure out the type of work that I wanted to do,” she says. “And the type of work I didn’t want to do.”

Long before finishing her studies at the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law at the University of Memphis, she was leaning toward plaintiff work. That goal solidified while she was clerking for a medical malpractice defense firm. Chasing down pleadings filed in multiple courts, she discovered the plaintiffs had missed the deadline to file on what she felt was a meritorious case. “Of course, ethically, I had to tell my boss about it,” she recalls. “I left soon thereafter because I felt so bad for finding this error.”

But there was a silver lining. She got a job as a judicial clerk, which is where she met Jehl, who was filing motions in a nursing home case. “You seem to understand and like this work,” he said after reaching a settlement for his client. “Do you have a job yet?”

In that moment, Acerra says, “It clicked. It made sense immediately. I had found good work where I could be on the right side most of the time. How can you argue against caring for elderly people? I felt like I had found my calling.”

It resonated for personal reasons as well. When Acerra was in her late teens, her grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s disease and was prone to wander, was moved to a nursing home. “What we saw firsthand was what I see every day in my practice now,” Acerra recalls. “You had these for-profit nursing homes run by out-of-state owners that would not have enough staff. … It would result in people, including my grandmother, not getting the basic care: incontinence care, feeding, water, just keeping them clean. It broke our hearts.

“We tried to find a lawyer back then, and we had been told people didn’t do that kind of work because elderly people’s lives had no legal value. I think I had a lot of guilt because we couldn’t keep my grandmother safely at home. Now I get to, every day, try to make up for that.”

By the time Acerra earned her J.D. in 2004, attitudes toward championing the elderly had changed. Wilkes & McHugh, where Jehl worked, and where Acerra came on board, focused on nursing home and elder abuse cases.

Litigation had been on her radar for some time. “I was champing at the bit to get in the courtroom because I’d seen all those lawyers my mom had worked for,” she says. “I was ready.”

In 2008, she signed on to that milestone $30 million nursing home case. Starting at Wilkes & McHugh, and continuing at Jehl Law Group, Acerra sued the nursing home owner directly on behalf of a woman with dementia who had lived at the facility for two years. Initially, her husband, who was also a resident there, was still mobile enough to help with some of her daily needs. But as he grew physically unable to move her, Acerra says, “You really saw a sharp drop-off in her care.”

Before long, the family was told she had a “spot” on her heel: “Nothing Neosporin and a Band-Aid won’t take care of,” the caregivers said. When her son visited, he found it was much more than a spot; it was a deeply infected wound spanning half of her heel—and spreading. The woman died two months later, after her leg had been amputated.

At trial, Acerra showed her compassion, not just for the family of the deceased, but for the nurse aides who recounted how they were spread too thin to give the resident the care she needed. “I’m as interested in protecting those workers as I am in protecting the patients,” Acerra says. “It helps everybody to have more staff at the facilities. If the focus is too much on labor expenses and minimizing costs, that care is not going to occur.”

Another turning point came when she cross-examined the nursing home owner. “He was prone to explaining things,” she says. “I’d pull out a document, read it, ask him if it said what it said, and then he’d say, ‘Can I explain?’ I’d say, ‘Sure, go ahead,’ and sit down. It happened a few times and, eventually, the jurors—especially the women—starting giggling. That’s when I knew they didn’t like it. … He had made some references to his parents being in heaven and hopefully knowing the deceased in the case, which isn’t tactful or classy, and I think that came across. Juries can see right through a person.”

During voir dire, instead of focusing on picking elderly jurors, “We empaneled people that we thought cared about other people,” she says. “I still remember looking up at the jury once they were empaneled and realizing nine of the 12 people we had chosen were under 30. That scared me to death because we’re dealing with a case about an older person. They may not have gone through a nursing home experience yet with a loved one to understand the dynamics. But we trusted our guts and our assessments in the moment and tried to be our true selves, and present the truth and be honest with the facts and the jury. I think we won their trust, thank goodness. They came back in our favor. It was a huge win.”
More recently, Acerra and colleagues Deena Arnold and April Huntoon wrapped up a Nashville trial on behalf of a woman who became a quadriplegic in a head-on collision in 2015. A few years later, she was admitted to a rehab hospital for a bedsore. By the time the family removed her from the hospital, she had developed 14 pressure sores and was septic.

The woman was Acerra’s age at the time of the accident; she had two young children, just like Acerra. Alert and oriented, the woman understood—and felt—everything. She died a few weeks after leaving the negligent medical facility.

Led by Acerra, an all-female legal team tried the case, telling a story of corporate greed by an out-of-state company that admitted far more patients than they could accommodate. The jury returned with a $7 million verdict.

“We’re dealing with post-trial motions right now, but it was special, it was a big win,” Acerra says. “We went in as a real underdog, and we were just authentic and honest with the facts.”

Acerra is picky about the cases she takes, although she occasionally shoulders one outside the norm: a wrongful death accident, an admiralty maritime injury, a products liability matter.

In 2023, she persuaded the Tennessee Supreme Court to throw out an arbitration agreement preventing a plaintiff’s family from filing suit for the nursing home death of their loved one, a man with Down syndrome, and she continues to challenge arbitration clauses she considers unenforceable. “I’m trying to fix things,” she says. “We’re all trying to make things better for people that are really vulnerable.”

This past summer, Acerra completed a yearlong stint as the second female president in the 60-year history of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association. One of her greatest achievements, she says, was enacting laws that help large groups of people—in particular, patients needing access to medical records. Previously, third-party companies charged Tennessee residents hefty per-page rates even for click-and-send electronic records. After a Tennessee state representative approached the TTLA for help in getting his cost-containment bill passed, Acerra and other members attended subcommittee hearings and testified before both the House and the Senate.

“A new law went into effect July 1 [2024] and copies of electronic medical records in the state of Tennessee are now capped at $90,” she says. “I took that one personally. I don’t even like the $90. I think that’s too high, but it was a negotiation and agreement that was met, and something that was much more palatable and doable for patients in this state than thousands of dollars.”

For Acerra, the old adage, “You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar” rings true.

“If I can do anything to make it easier for my clients, for the court, for the other side, even, I want to do it,” she says. “I think I can advocate and, at the same time, be a real person that can respect people’s positions. Once you have that relationship, I think you can get a whole lot done. … You save costs. You save time. And you get to the finish line a lot faster.”

The 32-Year Gap

“It had been 32 years since there had been a female president,” says Acerra, who served on the board for a decade before being elected to the top post. “One of the things I’m very proud of is that I made sure that we had women in executive committee roles, officer positions, because it’s from the officer positions that the president is selected.

During her recent time as president of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association, Acerra made an effort to pave the way for other women to head the TTLA in the future.

“We will not have another 32-year gap ever again.”