Donald W. Elliott, Jr.

Donald W. Elliott, Jr. is Senior Counsel in the Knoxville office of Johnson Evans & Headrick, P.C. He litigates a wide variety of civil and commercial matters, including medical malpractice and personal injury, first-party insurance disputes, insurance coverage and damage disputes, construction defect and project disputes, contractual disputes, landlord/tenant disputes, collection disputes, and condemnation and eminent domain matters.

Donald was born and raised in Texas. He graduated from New England Law | Boston in 2015, where he served as a Senior Literary Editor for the New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement. He earned his B.B.A. in Management and Marketing from the University of Houston's C.T. Bauer College of Business in 2007. Before relocating to Knoxville, Donald practiced law in Corpus Christi, Texas for seven years, including as a senior associate at Anderson, Lehrman, Barre & Maraist, L.L.P.

Donald has tried cases at the trial court level and has arbitrated civil matters, including construction disputes, from inception through final arbitration hearing with the American Arbitration Association and court-appointed arbitrators. He has taken and defended party, fact witness, and expert depositions, and has represented parties at mediation in construction, personal injury, and first-party insurance disputes. Donald has also acted as a mediator for parties in construction matters and has performed outside general counsel duties for governmental and private entities.

He has litigated insurance coverage disputes and claim disputes involving millions of dollars in damages, and has served as lead attorney in state and federal courts in both Texas and Tennessee. Notably, Donald handled state appeals at the appellate and supreme court levels in Texas, including overturning lower court rulings in the Texas Supreme Court case Lake Jackson Medical Spa, Ltd. v. Gaytan, 640 S.W.3d 830 (Tex. 2022), in favor of the medical providers.

Prior to attending law school, Donald worked as a catastrophe property adjuster for Allstate and as an international underwriter for ACE Group/Chubb. This experience provided him with invaluable insight into the operations of insurance companies, which has assisted him in representing both insureds and insurers in insurance claims issues and bad faith litigation.