Third in a series drawn from the public court file in Hill v. Ballad Health, Case No. C45217(S), Circuit Court for Sullivan County at Kingsport. The first article examined the July 2, 2026 dismissal order against the promises made on the record. The second examined the disclosures the record never contained. This one is about what Charles Hill did next.
There is a version of this story where Charles Hill comes out swinging.
His lawsuit against Ballad Health was dismissed on July 2 — on a legal defense Ballad’s own lawyers never raised, by an order that promised to take his facts as true and then discarded the ones that mattered, in a case that ended before a single page of discovery changed hands. All of that is documented in the court file, page numbers and all, and this newspaper has laid it out in detail. A man in that position has every human license to be loud.
Instead, on July 30 at 8:45 a.m., the clerk of the Sullivan County Circuit Court stamped something quieter and, in its way, more forceful: a fifteen-page Motion to Alter or Amend Judgment under Rule 59.04 of the Tennessee Rules of Civil Procedure — with a ready-to-sign order attached, drafted so that the judge who dismissed the case can undo the ruling himself.
Hill calls it building the judge a door.
What a 59.04 motion is
Most people have never heard of Rule 59.04, because most people never need it. It is the rule that lets a party ask a trial judge to alter or amend his own judgment — to correct a clear error of law before the case moves up to the Court of Appeals. It is, by design, a second look: the same judge, the same record, and a simple question. Are you sure?
It is not an appeal, and it is not an accusation. It is the mechanism the justice system itself provides for the possibility that a busy trial court got something wrong — and a chance to fix it at home, in Kingsport, rather than having three appellate judges in Knoxville do it later.
Hill’s motion presents five grounds. Each one is anchored to the court’s own words. The dismissal rested on a litigation privilege that appears in none of Ballad’s forty-plus pages of motions and was spoken by no one at either hearing — a defense Tennessee’s Rule 8.03 required Ballad to plead, and Ballad never did. The order credited the one allegation that helped the defense while disregarding the pleaded facts that defeat it — facts the court was required to take as true. It resolved a question Tennessee law reserves for juries using the language of summary judgment, while denying the discovery that summary judgment requires. Its own dispositive sentence — read exactly as written — states the opposite of its holding. And the motion places on the record Hill’s full answer to the health care liability argument the order left undecided, so that no reviewing court has to guess.
Strong words, respectfully delivered. The motion’s harshest sentence is a quotation.
The door itself
What makes the filing unusual is the last two pages: a proposed order, drafted by Hill, that Judge S. Curtis Rose could sign as-is.
It does not ask the judge to confess error. It does not use the words unethical, or improper, or any of the vocabulary Hill would be entitled to reach for. It recites two neutral findings — that the dismissal rested on an affirmative defense “not pleaded or raised by Defendant,” and that the timing questions in the case “cannot be resolved at the pleading stage” — and then, in five short paragraphs: the motion is granted, the July 2 order is vacated, the motion to dismiss is denied, the complaint is reinstated, and discovery proceeds.
Sign it, and the case comes back to life. No apology required. No fault assigned. The ruling corrects itself, and the court’s dignity walks out of the room intact.
“I respected this judge from the first day, and I said so publicly,” Hill says. “The order hurt — I won’t pretend it didn’t. But I still believe in the justice system. Believing in it doesn’t mean pretending nothing went wrong. It means using the tools the system gives you and giving the court the first chance to make it right. That’s what the motion is. I built him a door. Whether he walks through it is up to him.”
Attorneys familiar with such motions told Hill a trial judge grants one roughly once in every four attempts. He filed anyway — because under the rules, everything in the motion is now part of the permanent record. If the door goes unused, the same five grounds travel, word for word, to the Tennessee Court of Appeals in Knoxville, where a three-judge panel will review the legal questions with fresh eyes, owing the trial court’s conclusions no deference.
What happens next
The motion is set for hearing on August 21, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. — a date Hill obtained within the 30-day window the local rules require for presenting such motions. Ballad’s counsel has advised Hill she is unavailable that day, citing a two-week trial in another court, and has proposed early September; Hill has told her in writing he will accommodate her schedule, provided the resetting is done by an order that preserves oral argument. He has also filed a notice with the court making the same point: he requests argument, he does not waive it, and any delay past the 30-day window belongs to the defense, not to him.
However the scheduling resolves, the substance is now fixed in the file: five grounds, every citation, and a signature line waiting.
One in four. Those are the odds the lawyers gave him. The door is built either way — and doors like this one have a useful property. If it opens, the case comes back to life in Kingsport. If it stays shut, three judges in Knoxville will want to know why.
The motion, the proposed order, and every document cited in this article are public records, available from the Circuit Court Clerk in Kingsport and posted in the public case folder. Read them. Check them.
Case No. C45217(S), Hill v. Ballad Health, Circuit Court for Sullivan County at Kingsport.
