She won at trial - then a rule about raising defenses on time flipped the result
A Mississippi court revived a clinic's contract case against a former nurse - not on the merits, but because her defense came too late.
A Mississippi medical clinic will get another chance to enforce an employment contract against a former nurse, after a state appeals court ruled she waited too long to challenge the deal.
On July 28, 2026, the full Mississippi Court of Appeals reversed a lower court and sent the fight back for trial.
It started with a hire. On June 11, 2018, the nurse signed an employment agreement with Jones Family Medicine Clinic and its five satellite clinics. The contract carried a non-compete clause and a $10,000 liquidated-damages provision - a fixed sum the clinic said would "reimburse JFMC for its investment in training" her.
She left the job on June 28, 2019. Days later, on July 2, the clinic sued for breach of contract, asking a court to enforce the non-compete and hand over the $10,000.
Both sides came out swinging. The clinic claimed the nurse "lied about her credentials with insurance companies" and that her "deceitfulness" cost the practice about $14,711.54 to re-certify her. The nurse told a different story. She claimed she had grown worried the clinic's physician was "violating numerous rules, regulations, and laws" that could put her nursing license at risk. She also counterclaimed, alleging the clinics ordered her "to commit illegal actions" on the job, alongside claims that included alleged violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. None of those competing claims has been decided.
Here is where it turned. In her first answer, filed October 21, 2019, the nurse raised thirteen defenses - but not the one that later won the round for her. That defense was unconscionability: the argument that a contract is so lopsided it should not be enforced at all. She raised it only in an amended answer on January 29, 2021, then waited until June 29, 2023 to ask the court to toss the contract on that ground.
The trial court sided with her, finding the contract "both procedurally and substantively unconscionable" and unenforceable. A circuit court agreed.
The appeals court did not. It never decided whether the contract was actually unfair. Instead, it held the nurse had given up the unconscionability defense by failing to raise and pursue it promptly while actively litigating - pointing to the forty-four months between her first answer and her summary-judgment motion.
A dissenting judge would have let the ruling stand, blaming the delay on COVID-19 and the clinic's own foot-dragging on discovery.
The contract now returns to the county court for trial.
