Every April, the world turns its eyes to Augusta, where Georgia’s rolling greens and blooming azaleas set the stage for one of the most celebrated traditions in sports—the Masters Tournament. But this year, while golf fans marveled at precision and poise under pressure, Georgia was quietly making history of another kind. A far less admired tradition—one marked by runaway jury verdicts, legal system abuse, and skyrocketing insurance premiums—is finally being teed up for reform. With landmark tort legislation signed into law on April 21, 2025, Georgia has signaled that it’s ready to retire its long-standing status as a judicial hellhole and restore fairness to its civil justice system.
For the better part of the last decade, Georgia has earned a reputation as a “Judicial Hellhole,” a label bestowed by legal reform advocates due to the state’s increasingly plaintiff-friendly environment and its outsized nuclear verdicts. This designation hasn’t come without consequence. Insurers, businesses, and consumers alike have felt the sting of excessive litigation, unpredictable jury awards, and a legal climate that too often favored aggressive plaintiff strategies over balanced justice.
While the General Assembly made modest progress in recent years—including incremental reforms addressing time-limit (Holt) demands—those changes merely scratched the surface. The core issues driving litigation abuse, inflated settlements, and surging insurance premiums have remained largely unaddressed. Until now.
In a major step forward, Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law two significant bills—SB 68 and SB 69—marking the most comprehensive tort reform Georgia has seen in decades. Together, the laws overhaul key aspects of the state’s civil litigation system and aim to deliver greater balance, transparency, and predictability. It’s a move that stands to benefit not only the insurance industry, but also the broader Georgia economy and the everyday citizens who ultimately bear the costs of runaway litigation.
SB 68 serves as the cornerstone of this effort. It immediately reshapes longstanding rules in Georgia civil practice and evidentiary law. The bill reforms how courts handle admissibility of seat belt use in auto cases, tightens negligent security liability by requiring more specific and foreseeable warnings of harm, and limits recovery for medical expenses to their reasonable market value—addressing a key driver of inflated jury awards. It also ends the practice of double-dipping on attorney’s fees across overlapping statutes, curtails voluntary case dismissals by plaintiffs, and aligns Georgia’s civil procedure more closely with federal standards by staying discovery during dispositive motion practice. In wrongful death cases, the new law permits the trifurcation of trials, allowing courts to separate liability, compensatory damages, and punitive damages into distinct phases—an effort to reduce jury bias and streamline complex proceedings. The bill also includes an “anti-anchoring” provision to guard against the presentation of artificially high damage figures solely intended to sway jurors.
Complementing this sweeping legislation, SB 69 introduces long-overdue transparency into third-party litigation funding. Under the new law, parties must disclose when a lawsuit is being financed by an outside investor—a move designed to reduce hidden influence in litigation and ensure all parties, including the courts, understand who has a financial interest in the outcome.
While the industry is watching closely to see how Georgia courts interpret and implement these reforms, we do have some guidance from other states where similar reforms have been passed. For instance, the state of North Carolina has both a medical bill evidence rule (Rule 414) as well as a bifurcation statute that allows for a party to bifurcate liability from damages on cases with a minimum value attached. The bifurcation of liability has proven to be a very powerful tool and one that enables a jury to render a fair and impartial verdict on a substantial liability issue without being influenced by extensive discussion of damages or the impact that the incident had on the plaintiff. It has also allowed for creative high-low to take place where the high-low gets immediately put into effect based upon a specific ruling on the liability front.
Likewise, North Carolina is one of several states that allow evidence of the medical bills paid to come into evidence. This presents a jury with actual evidence of medical bills which they need to reimburse if appropriate rather than inflated totals that simply lead to inflated verdicts not based on actual damages. On the positive side, where a jury uses a multiplier, the lower the specials, the lower the multiplier. The industry should be aware; however, that in states where evidence of medical bills has been allowed, there has been an increased trend of plaintiffs not putting medical bills into evidence in any way. We expect to see this trend increase in Georgia.