Georgia’s 2025 Tort Reform: What Businesses, Insurers, and Litigators Need to Know
In recent years, Georgia has earned a prominent—and troubling—spot on the American Tort Reform Association’s annual “Judicial Hellholes” list,[1] drawing national attention to the state’s increasingly unpredictable and plaintiff-friendly litigation climate. This designation has galvanized momentum among lawmakers, businesses, and insurers for sweeping tort reform.
After months of intense legislative debate and vigorous lobbying from both plaintiffs’ and defense interests, Georgia’s General Assembly passed Senate Bill 68 on March 21, 2025. Governor Brian Kemp signed the bill into law on April 21, 2025, ushering in one of the most sweeping overhauls of Georgia’s civil justice system in decades. The new law fundamentally alters key aspects of tort litigation, including limitations on damages “anchoring,” procedural rules governing motions to dismiss and voluntary dismissals, and liability standards in negligent security cases. While some provisions take effect prospectively, most apply immediately to pending cases, making it essential for businesses, insurers, and litigators to quickly adapt.
The following overview breaks down the most critical components of the new law and explores what they mean for the future of litigation in Georgia.
1. Anchoring Arguments and Noneconomic Damages
What Changed: Under the new law, plaintiffs’ attorneys are no longer permitted to present testimony or evidence regarding the specific dollar value of noneconomic damages, such as pain and suffering, during trial or introduce arbitrary monetary anchors—such as celebrity salaries or luxury item values—to suggest noneconomic damages during closing arguments. While counsel may still suggest a specific figure during closing argument, the proposed amount must be introduced in the opening portion of the closing argument and may not be altered later in rebuttal. Most importantly, any suggested figure must be “rationally related” to the evidence presented at trial.
Why It Matters: Trial courts will now play a central role in policing damages arguments to ensure compliance with the new evidentiary standard and to prevent undue influence on juries through speculative or emotionally charged comparisons. Additionally, litigators in Georgia should expect plaintiffs’ attorneys to find increasingly creative ways to sidestep these limitations by exploiting the statute’s nebulous and easily manipulable definition of “noneconomic damages.”
2. Discovery Stay on Motions to Dismiss
What Changed: Under the amended version of O.C.G.A. § 9-11-12(j), a defendant may file a motion to dismiss in lieu of an answer, and doing so automatically stays discovery until the court rules—regardless of how long that takes. However, under the new law, if a defendant files an answer before the court rules on the motion, the discovery stay is immediately lifted. Defendants whose motions are denied will have 15 days from the date of the ruling to file their answer.
Why It Matters: By clarifying the rules around discovery stays, the amendment reduces unnecessary litigation costs for defendants faced with meritless claims. For defense counsel, the key takeaway is strategic: do not file an answer alongside a motion to dismiss unless you are prepared to proceed with discovery.
3. Limitations on Voluntary Dismissals
What Changed: The 2025 amendment to O.C.G.A. § 9-11-41 limits the longstanding procedural tool that allowed plaintiffs to voluntarily dismiss their case without prejudice at virtually any point before trial. The updated statute now provides that plaintiffs may only voluntarily dismiss their case without prejudice within 60 days of the defendant’s answer being filed. After that window closes, dismissal without court approval is no longer permitted.
Why It Matters: This reform directly targets the strategic misuse of Georgia’s permissive dismissal rule, which had become a tool for procedural gamesmanship. By imposing a 60-day limitation, the new law encourages greater efficiency and accountability. For defendants, this change provides greater stability and reduces the risk of incurring unnecessary legal expenses tied to repeated filings and venue changes.
4. Evidence of Seatbelt Non-Usage
What Changed: With the 2025 amendment to O.C.G.A. § 40-8-76.1, courts are expressly permitted to admit evidence of a plaintiff’s failure to wear a seatbelt. Such evidence may now be considered on a range of issues, including negligence, causation, assumption of risk, and apportionment of fault. While trial judges retain discretion under evidentiary rules (such as relevance and balancing rules), seatbelt nonuse is no longer categorically excluded from the jury’s consideration.
Why It Matters: This change corrects a glaring and outdated imbalance in Georgia tort law and allow juries to consider seatbelt usage (or non-usage) as part of the overall negligence analysis. By allowing jurors to weigh whether a plaintiff failed to take this fundamental safety precaution, the reform aligns Georgia with the majority of U.S. states.
5. No Double Recovery of Attorneys’ Fees
What Changed: Under the prior framework, plaintiffs could obtain fee awards under both:
- O.C.G.A. § 13-6-11, which permits recovery of attorneys’ fees where a defendant acted in bad faith or was “stubbornly litigious,” and
- O.C.G.A. § 9-11-68, which awards fees when a plaintiff’s settlement offer is rejected and the final judgment exceeds 125% of that offer.
The new O.C.G.A. § 9-15-16 expressly prohibits duplicative recovery of attorneys’ fees, court costs, or litigation expenses unless a statute specifically authorizes it. The reform also bars admission of contingency fee agreements into evidence to determine the reasonable value of legal services.
Why It Matters: Plaintiffs’ attorneys often took advantage of this loophole to threaten exponential fee awards in policy-limits demand scenarios (e.g., Holt demands), especially where insurers rejected early settlement offers before “bad facts” came to light. By eliminating this threat, the new law creates a more predictable risk environment for insurers and defendants and removes a costly multiplier from settlement calculus, discouraging opportunistic behavior and closing what had become a high-value loophole for the plaintiffs’ bar.
6. Phantom Damages and Collateral Sources
What Changed: This provision of S.B. 68 directly addresses the longstanding problem of “phantom damages”—billed medical amounts that vastly exceed what providers actually accept as payment from insurers. The new O.C.G.A. § 51-12-12.1 establishes that if a plaintiff has any form of health insurance or workers’ compensation coverage, juries may consider both:
- The billed charges, and
- The amounts actually necessary to satisfy those charges under the plaintiff’s insurance or applicable benefit program.
Further, in cases involving treatment under a letter of protection (LOP) or similar third-party funding arrangement, several new categories of information are both relevant and discoverable, including:
- A copy of the LOP;
- Itemized billing with standard medical coding (e.g., CPT codes);
- The identity of any third party who purchased the receivable and the price paid;
- Information about who referred the plaintiff for treatment.
The statute explicitly abrogates the common law collateral source rule to the extent necessary to admit this evidence, while preserving the trial court’s discretion to issue jury instructions aimed at preventing confusion.
Why It Matters: By allowing juries to consider what care actually cost—rather than inflated, often fictional “billed” amounts—the statute curtails a tactic that has long inflated verdicts and fueled litigation abuse, particularly by lien-based medical providers. The statute is also expected to significantly diminish the influence of “lawsuit clinics” that discourage plaintiffs from using health insurance in favor of lien-based treatment.
Unfortunately, the statute’s silence on how to value care for uninsured plaintiffs leaves a potential loophole. Still, for insurers, businesses, and defense counsel, the new law is a game-changer—reducing exposure, curbing inflated verdicts, and restoring a level playing field in damages litigation.
7. Bifurcation of Trials
What Changed: The statute, codified at O.C.G.A. § 51-12-15, permits any party to request a bifurcated trial, separating the liability phase from the damages phase. That means juries will first determine who is at fault and in what percentage before hearing any evidence about the severity of the plaintiff’s injuries or the monetary value of those injuries. If the plaintiff is found to be 50% or more at fault, the case ends immediately with no damages awarded. If the plaintiff is found to be less than 50% at fault, the trial proceeds to a second phase where damages are assessed. Importantly, evidence and arguments about damages are completely excluded from the first phase.
Why It Matters: Under the previous system, jurors often heard both liability and damage evidence at the same time—an arrangement that could lead to verdicts swayed by sympathy rather than fault. By separating the two phases, the law removes a long-time tactical advantage from plaintiffs’ lawyers, who often leaned heavily on emotionally charged testimony to influence jurors’ views on liability.
For defendants, this shift provides a clearer opportunity to present a neutral, fact-based liability defense—especially helpful in multi-defendant or apportionment-heavy cases.
8. Premises Liability and Negligent Security Reform
What Changed: In what is perhaps its most controversial section, S.B. 68 introduces a comprehensive statutory overhaul of negligent security claims through O.C.G.A. §§ 51-3-50 to 51-3-57. The new law offers increased protections for landowners and security contractors by:
- Codifying, for the first time, the definition of “negligent security”;
- Imposing heightened thresholds for holding property owners liable for third-party criminal conduct by requiring either a “particularized warning” of imminent criminal conduct or actual knowledge of prior substantially similar incidents;
- Limiting liability to situations where the landowner failed to mitigate a specific physical condition that made the premises unusually susceptible to criminal activity;
- Restricting liability in cases involving licensees or trespassers;
- Clarifying that landowners are not obligated to police public order on their property (O.C.G.A. § 51-3-55);
- Extending the same legal protections to contracted security firms (O.C.G.A. § 51-3-57).
Perhaps most importantly, the new O.C.G.A. § 51-3-56 introduces a rebuttable presumption that an apportionment of fault to the criminal actor cannot be less than the fault apportioned to the defendants. Furthermore, plaintiffs will be barred from arguing the financial impact apportionment will have on the case (i.e., criminal can’t pay any money), theoretically preventing the jury from reverse engineering a verdict amount they want the plaintiff to receive.
Why It Matters: The new statute introduces much needed changes intended to address incongruous and inherently unfair verdicts—such as the $43M award in Georgia CVS Pharmacy, LLC v. Carmichael, 316 Ga. 718, 890 S.E.2d 209 (2023)—and to curb the recent proliferation of nuclear negligent security claims. However, these changes will likely face constitutional scrutiny for curtailing plaintiffs’ rights, interfering with the jury’s ability to decide issues of liability and damages, and shifting longstanding liability doctrines.
[1] https://www.judicialhellholes.org/hellhole/2024-2025/georgia/.