Administrative Law

A letter from a licensing board is unwelcome mail for anyone who has built a practice or a business. The questions it raises are practical ones: what is this, how serious is it, what is my deadline, and can I keep working while it runs. The short answers: it is an administrative matter, and no one has filed a lawsuit against you; the notice itself typically signals how serious it is; the controlling deadline is usually printed on the document, and it is short; and in most cases you keep operating while the process runs.

Handled early, most agency matters resolve without a hearing. Handled late, they arrive at a hearing that will produce the only factual record a court is ever likely to see. That sequence, and why the early stages carry most of the weight, is what this page explains — for license cases and for the broader family of agency disputes that run on the same track in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama.

Overview

Administrative law covers disputes decided inside state agencies: professional and occupational licensing, permits and approvals, civil penalties and enforcement orders, survey and certification findings, and payment disputes with state programs. Michael represents licensees, providers, and businesses in these matters across Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, from the first investigation letter through the contested hearing and, when needed, judicial review. The work spans answering an investigator’s request in a way that can close the file, negotiating with agency counsel, trying the contested case when a matter will not resolve, and challenging the final order in court.

Most of these matters resolve before anyone testifies. They resolve on better terms when the agency can see that the response is organized, the records are assembled, and the case is prepared to go the distance if it has to. Readiness for the hearing is what makes the quiet resolution available; that principle runs through everything below.

Michael has worked both sides of this table. From 1995 to 1997 he was an Agency Attorney at the Alabama Certificate of Need Board, handling certificate-of-need, administrative, and regulatory law, agency rulemaking, and contested cases from inside a state agency. That experience is mechanical, and it is the useful kind: he knows how an agency assembles a file, what its lawyers must prove, and how a response reads from the government’s side of the desk. He is admitted in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Administrative law is one of seven practice areas at the firm, and it is the machinery under several of the others — a contested Certificate of Need case is an administrative proceeding from start to finish, and home-health licensure and survey disputes run on the same track.

Disputes that live in an agency

The first orientation point changes the geometry of everything that follows: no one is suing you. In a civil lawsuit, a private party wants damages and a court decides. In an agency matter, the state itself proposes to act — to discipline a license, deny an approval, assess a penalty, or order something stopped — and the decision, at least at first, belongs to the agency. The proceeding’s formal name in all three states is a contested case; that phrase, or something near it, is likely on the notice in your hand.

One procedural system handles a surprising range of problems. A nurse answering a board complaint, a contractor contesting a citation, a facility disputing a survey finding, a developer appealing a permit denial, and a company challenging a civil penalty are all on the same track: notice, an opportunity for a hearing, an agency decision, and a narrow path to court afterward. Even special-education due-process hearings are administrative proceedings in form, decided by a hearing officer under an agency’s rules.

The differences from ordinary litigation are practical, and they cut both ways. There is no jury. Discovery is thin next to civil practice; much of what you learn comes from the agency’s investigative file. Evidence rules are relaxed. Front-end deadlines are rigid. And the decision-maker may be the agency that brought the case, which is exactly why the protections that do exist — notice, a real hearing, a record, eventual review by a court — are the ones to use with care.

Board investigations and the first response

Most license matters open with an investigation, and most investigations open with a complaint: a patient or client, a former employer, a competitor, an audit, another agency. What arrives is usually a letter saying a file has been opened and asking for a written response, records, or an interview with an investigator. A letter, by itself, decides nothing about your license. It means a file now exists, and everything you submit becomes part of it.

A capable professional’s first instinct is to call and explain. The instinct is sound. The unstructured version of it is the problem: an investigator is assembling evidence for a possible case, and a casual statement — a phone call, an offhand email, an interview given before you have seen the complaint — is evidence, fixed in the file early, while the issue is only half-understood. The same explanation, organized against the records and submitted deliberately, is often what closes a file. No stage of the process rewards preparation more than this one.

You generally keep practicing while an investigation runs; an open file does not restrict a license. The exception is summary suspension, a separate and uncommon step reserved for allegations of imminent harm to the public. If that is the order you have received, the timeline has already compressed from months to days, and counsel should be involved immediately.

Two honest answers about expectations. Timing: investigations run anywhere from weeks to more than a year, and the agency sets the pace. Outcomes: the full spectrum runs from dismissal, through non-public resolution and remedial terms such as continuing education or monitoring, to public reprimand, and in serious cases suspension or revocation. Where a matter lands has a great deal to do with what enters the file at this first stage.

Consent orders and what they trade away

Many board matters end on paper: a consent order, sometimes styled an agreed order, in which the licensee accepts recited facts and terms and the case closes. Consent orders are often the right resolution. They end uncertainty, they can narrow what is admitted, and they avoid a hearing whose record might read worse than the negotiated terms. They also carry consequences that do not appear on their face, and those consequences are the reason to read one slowly.

Before signing, a licensee should be able to answer four questions:

• Who will see it? A consent order is public discipline — visible to employers, hospitals, licensing databases, and anyone who searches.
• What gets reported? For health professions, board discipline is reportable to the National Practitioner Data Bank, and reportability is fixed by federal rule; it is not a term the board can bargain away. Certain interim steps, including an agreement to stop practicing while a matter is resolved, can be reportable as well.
• Where does it travel? Discipline in one state can trigger reciprocal proceedings in other states where you hold a license, and credentialing bodies, payers, and employers often require disclosure.
• What does compliance require? The order’s terms are enforceable, and violating them is a new violation — usually an easier one for the agency to prove than the original allegations.

Sometimes the consent order is still the right outcome. The point is to price it before signing, and to negotiate the recited facts with as much care as the sanction, because the recitals are what other states, data banks, and credentialing committees will act on later.

Contested-case hearings

When a matter does not resolve, the state issues formal charges: a notice setting out the allegations, the rules said to be violated, and the action proposed. The notice includes a window for requesting a hearing, and this is the least forgiving deadline in the process — if it passes, the proposed action typically becomes final by default, with no hearing held and nothing for a court to review later. The first task when charges arrive is to find that date and calendar it.

What follows resembles litigation, compressed. Discovery exists but is limited, and much of it is the agency’s own investigative file. A prehearing conference narrows the issues and sets the exchange of exhibits and witness lists. The hearing itself runs on sworn testimony, cross-examination, and documentary exhibits before an administrative law judge, or ALJ. The rules of evidence are relaxed, so material a civil court would exclude can come in, and the work of objecting and building a clean record falls that much more heavily on counsel. It usually happens in a conference room. It is adversarial all the same; the state appears through a lawyer whose job is to prove the case.

Who decides varies by state. In Tennessee, ALJs come from the Secretary of State’s Administrative Procedures Division; depending on the agency and its statute, the ALJ either decides the case or presides over the hearing while the licensing board itself decides. In Georgia, most boards refer contested cases to the Office of State Administrative Hearings, a central panel of independent ALJs, whose decisions the referring agency has a limited period to act on before they stand. In Alabama, there is no central panel, and the hearing takes place within the agency involved. The state-by-state section below fills this in.

The hearing produces a transcript, an exhibit file, and a written decision: in some postures an initial order that becomes final unless taken up within the agency, in others a final order outright. Reconsideration or rehearing is generally available and generally optional, but the clocks interact, and pursuing the wrong post-decision step can spend the window for going to court. Treat the decision date as the start of a new calendar and map every deadline on it at once.

The record and why it decides cases

Everything in this practice bends around one fact. “Appeal” is the word everyone reaches for, and it misleads: when a court reviews an agency decision, it reviews the record the agency made — the transcript, the exhibits, the findings — and very little else. Judicial review in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama is not a second trial: there is no jury, witnesses are not recalled, and new evidence comes in only in narrow circumstances. A document never offered, a witness never called, an objection never made: the reviewing court will generally never know they existed. For practical purposes, what is missing from the record is missing from the case.

Review is deferential on the facts. The three states phrase their standards differently, and the phrasing matters to lawyers briefing them, but the effect is the same everywhere: where the agency’s factual findings have real support in the record, a court will not reweigh the evidence or substitute its judgment, even if it might have found otherwise. Close factual calls belong to the agency.

Legal questions increasingly run the other way, and this is a live development. All three states have moved to end the older practice of deferring to an agency’s interpretation of its own statutes and rules: Tennessee did it by statute in 2022; Georgia’s courts pared the doctrine back to nearly nothing before a 2026 statute eliminated it; Alabama enacted the same change in 2026, by a statute that takes effect that October. The shift parallels the federal courts’ retreat from agency deference. Where it is in force, courts decide questions of law for themselves. The newest statutes are largely untested, so the change should be read carefully: the law gets a fresh look on review, while the facts stay decided.

The consequence sits at the front of the case, and it is the practical reason early counsel matters: the hearing is where the outcome is substantially determined, even when a court is the one that eventually says so. Counsel present while the record is being made can shape what a reviewing court will someday see. Counsel retained after the final order works with whatever record exists; sometimes that is enough, and often it is the entire problem.

Judicial review of agency decisions

Each state routes review to a different court, under its own administrative procedure act. In Tennessee, a petition for judicial review under the Uniform Administrative Procedures Act goes to chancery court. In Georgia, review under the state APA goes to superior court, after administrative remedies are exhausted; carrying the case further, to the Court of Appeals, generally requires the appellate court’s permission through a discretionary application — a step that catches lawyers, let alone parties. In Alabama, review under the Alabama Administrative Procedure Act runs to circuit court in two steps: a notice of appeal and cost bond filed with the agency itself, followed by a petition filed in court. Skipping the agency-level step is one of the classic ways an otherwise sound Alabama appeal ends early. And several Alabama licensing statutes route review their own way — physician discipline, for one, is appealed directly to the Court of Civil Appeals — so the safe assumption in Alabama is that your statute is special until confirmed otherwise.

The windows are short in all three states: days and weeks, differing by state, by agency, and by the step you are on. Some run from entry of the order, others from its service, and that distinction alone has decided cases. The controlling deadline is usually stated on or with the order, and it is sooner than most people expect; if your document is silent about it, treat that as a reason to get counsel the same day rather than as extra time. Read the order the day it arrives.

Filing for review does not by itself pause the agency’s action in any of the three states. Whether you can keep operating during the appeal depends on getting a stay, and the rules differ sharply. In Tennessee and Georgia, a stay is discretionary — sought from the agency or the court — and Georgia will not stay a medical or dental license suspension unless the court finds the public will not be harmed. Alabama runs the other way: when a decision suspends or revokes a license, the appealing licensee is ordinarily entitled to a stay on reasonable conditions, unless the agency persuades the court that a stay would endanger the public. In every state, continued operation during review is something to secure deliberately, at the start, as part of the appeal itself.

When the record supports it, review is a real remedy: reversal for legal error, setting aside findings without record support, remand for a defective process. Michael handles petitions for judicial review in all three states, and appellate work runs through the practice more broadly — he is admitted before the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Sixth and Eleventh Circuits, the federal appellate courts for Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, and has litigated federal appeals, including a Sixth Circuit appeal decided in his client’s favor. (He is also admitted before the Ninth Circuit, which covers western states.) Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Professional licensing defense

License defense is where this machinery touches the most people. A professional license is the asset a livelihood sits on, and every licensed occupation answers to a board with the power to investigate, charge, and discipline. Michael represents licensees before boards and agencies across Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, from the first letter through hearing and review. His own appearances include real estate commissions, Certificate of Need boards, boards of nursing, the state bar, departments of revenue, and state Medicaid agencies. The landscape groups roughly this way:

• Health-care licensees — nurses, physicians, pharmacists, dentists, and behavioral-health professionals — answer to boards such as the Tennessee Board of Nursing, the Georgia Composite Medical Board, and the Alabama Board of Nursing, where discipline also carries data-bank and credentialing consequences.
• Educators face certificate and ethics matters before the state educator-standards bodies.
• Contractors and the trades contend with licensing citations, unlicensed-practice allegations, and board disputes.
• Real-estate professionals — brokers, agents, and appraisers — face commission complaints and discipline.

For professionals licensed in more than one state, the file in front of you is rarely the whole exposure: discipline in one state routinely draws scrutiny in the others, through reciprocal proceedings and reporting. Michael’s admission in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama lets a multi-state matter be handled as one problem, on one strategy, instead of as three referrals.

Permits, penalties and enforcement actions

Licensing is the familiar case; the same machinery decides much more. A denied or revoked permit, an environmental or land-use approval, a civil penalty assessment, a cease-and-desist order, a repayment demand from a state program — each is agency action, each comes with hearing rights, and each runs on the contested-case track described above. The agency’s name changes. The procedure, the record discipline, and the deadlines behave the same way.

Businesses often treat an agency penalty or denial as weather — something to absorb and move past. The penalty gets paid to close the issue, or the permit denial gets answered with a fresh application, without anyone asking whether the agency acted within its statute, the kind of legal question courts increasingly answer for themselves, without deference to the agency. Paying or refiling is sometimes the sensible business call. It should be a decision rather than a default, made with the hearing rights and the calendar in view, because the same short windows apply here and they close whether or not anyone is watching.

Across Tennessee, Georgia & Alabama

The three states share the architecture — investigation, contested case, deferential review — and differ in the details that decide cases. The forum, the decision-maker, and the route to court are all state-specific, and assumptions carried from one state into another are a recurring source of missed steps.

Tennessee. Contested cases run under the Uniform Administrative Procedures Act. ALJs come from the Administrative Procedures Division of the Secretary of State’s office, and hearings for statewide boards are often held in Nashville, where Michael practices. Depending on the agency, the ALJ either decides the matter or presides while the board decides, and the distinction affects how the case is argued and who must be persuaded. Judicial review goes to chancery court.

Georgia. Georgia operates a true central panel: the Office of State Administrative Hearings, based in Atlanta, supplies independent ALJs who hear cases referred by most boards and agencies. In many case types the ALJ’s decision is initial, and the referring agency has a limited period to act on it before it stands. Judicial review goes to superior court once administrative remedies are exhausted, and the discretionary-application requirement noted above governs the next step up.

Alabama. Alabama has no central panel; hearings take place inside the agency involved — the board itself, a hearing officer it designates, or, for some professions, a dedicated commission. Because the first genuinely independent look at a case may be the reviewing court’s, the record discipline described above matters most in Alabama. Review goes to circuit court through the two-step notice-and-bond sequence, and Michael’s years as agency counsel were spent inside an Alabama agency.

Counsel’s role at each stage

The useful version of “do I need a lawyer” is stage-specific. At the investigation stage, the job is the first response: framed well, it can close the file before charges exist, and it is the point of maximum leverage in the entire process. At the charging and hearing stage, the job is the record — the testimony, exhibits, and objections a reviewing court will one day be confined to. On review, the job is working within that record: framing the legal error, meeting the deference standards, and taking the procedural steps in the right order. Each stage inherits what the last one produced.

Some matters do not need a lawyer. Routine renewals, ordinary compliance questions, and low-stakes citations with fixed penalties are things a careful professional can usually handle alone. Two cautions travel even with those: anything said or submitted to an agency goes into a file that keeps it, and a routine matter changes character the moment a response could read as an admission. When the stakes are the license or the business itself, the calculation changes.

Michael’s administrative record includes both chairs. As Agency Attorney at the Alabama Certificate of Need Board from 1995 to 1997, he worked on certificate-of-need, administrative, and regulatory law, agency rulemaking, and contested cases from inside the agency. In private practice, he won a contested Certificate of Need matter for a Medicare-certified home-health startup in the greater Birmingham area, an administrative case carried through the contested-case process. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Related

The neighboring pages cover the industries whose disputes run on this machinery: Certificate of Need, for contested CON applications, oppositions, and appeals, and home-health regulatory, for licensure, survey, and certification matters in that field. Supporting articles on board investigations, hearings, appeals, and consent orders are planned and will be linked here as they publish.

The first conversation

Administrative deadlines do their damage in the first quiet days, while a letter sits on a desk and reads as less urgent than it is. If an agency letter, a notice of charges, or a final order is in front of you, two details determine most of what happens next: the deadline that applies and the stage it puts you at. Those are the first things we look at. Get in touch and send the document itself: the notice, any earlier correspondence, the dates. Those tell us more at the outset than a narrative can. We will read the document with you, identify which clock is running, and give you a plain assessment of what handling it well requires — including, when that is the honest answer, that it is a matter you can manage on your own.

This page is general information about administrative law in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, not legal advice, and reading it doesn’t create an attorney-client relationship.

Common questions

What is a contested case hearing?

A contested case hearing is the formal proceeding you are entitled to before a state agency's action against your license, permit, or business becomes final. No one is suing you for damages; the state is deciding whether to act. The hearing runs like a trial — sworn testimony, exhibits, cross-examination, an administrative law judge — with no jury and relaxed rules of evidence.

What happens at a license board hearing?

The state presents its case through a lawyer; you respond with testimony, documents, and witnesses, with cross-examination on both sides. Depending on the state, an administrative law judge decides or presides while the board decides. Everything said and admitted becomes the official record — the same record a court will review if you appeal.

Can I appeal a state agency decision?

Yes. Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama each allow a court to review a final agency decision. But it is not a new trial: a judge reviews the existing agency record for legal, procedural, and evidentiary error. Courts defer to the agency's factual findings, and legal questions increasingly get a fresh look. Cases are usually won or lost while the record is being made before the agency.

How long do I have to appeal?

The windows are short — days to weeks, and they differ by state, by agency, and by the stage of the case. Some run from the date the order is entered, others from the date it is served on you, and Alabama adds a required agency-level filing before the court petition. The controlling deadline is usually stated on or with your order; read it the day it arrives, and treat a silent document as a reason to get advice immediately, not as extra time.

Do I need a lawyer for an administrative hearing?

You are allowed to represent yourself, and the agency will be represented by counsel either way; the procedural rules bind you regardless. The hearing also creates the only record a reviewing court will ever see. Counsel involved at the investigation stage can shape that record from the start; counsel hired after a final order is limited to whatever record already exists.

Can I keep working while my license is under investigation?

Generally, yes. An investigation alone doesn't restrict your license; discipline requires the process to run. The exception is summary suspension, a separate and extraordinary step reserved for allegations of imminent harm. If you receive a summary suspension order, the timeline compresses dramatically and you should get counsel immediately.

Should I sign the consent order the board sent me?

Not before understanding what it trades away. A consent order is public discipline: for health professionals it is reportable to the National Practitioner Data Bank (reportability can't be negotiated away), it can trigger reciprocal discipline in other states where you hold a license, and violating its terms is a new violation. Sometimes it's the right resolution — but only with the collateral consequences priced in.

Wherever your matter stands, the next step is a conversation. Call (615) 378-8942 or email mfb@braun-law.com.