Milt Capps has an update on the birth of the Tennessee Venture Council, an industry group that promises to collect data and play an advocacy role, although its priorities aren't yet clear. A website is live but still needs to be fleshed out a good bit.

Preliminary work on the Council was largely shouldered by now-30-year-old Landon Gibbs, a seemingly all-purpose aide to McWhorter and his father, Clayton, the former HCA president who is also co-founder of Clayton Associates. Gibbs is identified on his Linkedin page only as director of healthcare initiatives for Clayton Associates. He has, however, played key support roles with respect to the McWhorters' involvement in both the Nashville Entrepreneur Center and Bullpen Ventures.

The talent shortage locally in a number of technology sectors continues to bedevil many growing organizations, but Vanderbilt University School of Engineering professor Douglas Schmidt says employers can help themselves by getting more involved with the region's colleges and universities.

The law and technology sector veterans leading a young legal project management company have settled on Nashville as their headquarters and are eager to make a big splash in the growing market of helping attorneys better organize their workflow. Milt Capps caught up with former Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis partner Larry Bridgesmith, who is leading business development for the company. Among Bridgesmith's projections if funding comes through soon as expected: ERM Legal will be home to 100 employees in a year and may be eyeing a second fundraising round. Check out the venture's website here.

Its core technology is adaptible for verticals in addition to LPM; and, earlier versions were developed for use in process and project management by tool and die makers in the automotive sector, Bridgesmith explained. Roughly $650,000 has been invested in the technology in the past few years, he added.

In a wrapup of some recent activity at TNInvestco funds, Milt Capps writes about TriStar's Technology's interest in a young San Francisco-area company that's developing technology to better analyze molecular interaction and thus help speed up drug development projects. The company's approach is based concepts that originated at Vanderbilt University and its acceptance of TriStar's cash should lead it to relocate its home office here.

American Hometown Publishing CEO Dan Hammond is spinning out a business unit from the company including its Just A Pinch recipe sharing site. Milt Capps has the story on Hammond's new venture, American Hometown Media, and its planned $5 million capital raise.

That's the amount of money new local venture capital fund Heritage Healthcare Innovation Fund told the Securities and Exchange Commission it plans to raise (HT: Venture Nashville). Our earlier story on the formation of the fund by hospital groups including Vanguard Health Systems and Community Health Systems is here. A report in Michigan has previously pegged the fund target at $150 million.

Among realities militating toward caution, said Coleman: The current venture-capital fundraising environment is extremely challenging; and, there remains uncertainty about how Reform will play-out. Institutional investors’ pursuit of liquidity is also hampering private-equity funding, he noted.

While the ClearPractice headquarters will be St. Louis, Nashville will become home to a new 15-person office dedicated to sales, telemarketing and administration. ClearPractice's total workforce is projected to hit 110 in the U.S. and 400 in Hyderabad, India, by Dec. 31, 2011.