The main goal of this paper is to introduce new local stability conditions for continuous- time Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy systems. These stability conditions are based on linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) in combination with quadratic Lyapunov functions. Moreover, they integrate information on the membership functions at the origin and effectively leverage the linear structure of the underlying nonlinear system in the vicinity of the origin. As a result, the proposed conditions are proved to be less conservative compared to existing methods using fuzzy Lyapunov functions. Moreover, we establish that the proposed methods offer necessary and sufficient conditions for the local exponential stability of T-S fuzzy systems. Discussions on the inherent limitations associated with fuzzy Lyapunov approaches are also given. To illustrate the theoretical results, we provide comprehensive examples that demonstrate the core concepts and validate the efficacy of the proposed conditions.