Georgia Rewrote Its Courtrooms. Now Comes the Test.

For nearly two decades, Georgia carried a label no state wants: judicial hellhole. Nuclear verdicts, those eight- and nine-figure jury awards that used to be outliers, stopped being rare. Businesses got dragged into negligent security suits for crimes they didn't commit. Juries saw inflated medical bills that no insurer had ever actually paid.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the background, hedge funds and private investors were quietly bankrolling lawsuits with no obligation to say so. By late 2024, Georgia had spent six straight years on the American Tort Reform Foundation's Judicial Hellholes list, and was at or near the top for most of it.

Then, in April 2025, Gov. Brian Kemp signed Senate Bills 68 and 69, the most significant rewrite of Georgia's civil litigation rules since 2005. Eighteen months later, these reforms aren't just a talking point: they're a working system, tested on real cases in real courtrooms. The reforms have had time to meet the docket.

What the Bills Actually Do

SB 68 targets the mechanics of a trial itself by ending the practice of “phantom damages,” the old rule that let plaintiffs put a hospital's full billed amount in front of a jury even when the insurer had negotiated down to pay a fraction of it. Now juries can see what was actually paid, not just what was billed, while defendants can also demand discovery into how a plaintiff's medical treatment was arranged in the first place. That includes referral relationships and whether the debt was sold to a third party.

The bill also curbs “anchoring,” the closing-argument tactic where an attorney throws out a big, dramatic, unrelated number knowing that juries tend to land closer to whatever number they hear first. Now, that number can't come out until after the evidence is in, and it must be “rationally related” to what the jury heard.

Then there's bifurcation, the provision defense attorneys talk about most. In high-stakes bodily injury or wrongful death cases with more than $150,000 at issue, any party can now ask the court to split the trial into separate phases for liability and damages, including a third phase for punitive damages. DLA Piper's litigation team notes the structure lets defendants argue fault to a jury before it hears a damages number, “reducing the risk of prejudicial anchoring.”

SB 68's other big procedural shifts are narrower but still significant. Negligent security claims got harder to bring, since juries now must assign fault to the actual perpetrator rather than the business that failed to stop them. Seatbelt evidence is admissible for the first time too, bringing Georgia in line with most of the country.

SB 69 focuses on who's paying for the lawsuit, marking the first real regulation of third-party litigation financing in Georgia's history. Funders now must register with the state, and any financing agreement of $25,000 or more is subject to discovery. This means the other side can find out who has a financial stake in the outcome.

As Shook, Hardy & Bacon explains, funders are also barred from “directing the litigation or settlement, choosing counsel or expert witnesses,” and a funder that puts in $25,000 or more can be held jointly and severally liable for sanctions or costs. Foreign adversaries and sovereign wealth funds are barred outright, while other violations carry felony exposure, up to five years, and a $10,000 fine.

18 Months In: What's Actually Changing

SB 68 passed narrowly, SB 69 passed 52-0, and 18 months later, the results are just as split as the votes. The clearest early scorecard came in December 2025, when the American Tort Reform Foundation moved Georgia off the Judicial Hellholes list entirely for the first time in years and credited the reforms for the move. Georgia didn't disappear from the report, though: it landed on the foundation's “Watch List,” with several metro Atlanta courts flagged for scrutiny through 2026. This is a signal that the designation change is provisional, not necessarily confirmation that the reforms are working as intended.

In practice, SB 68’s bifurcation gives the defense a real shot at winning or narrowing what's in dispute before a jury ever hears a dollar figure. This reshapes when and how cases settle. Instead of settling on the courthouse steps, some cases are now settling right after a liability verdict, once both sides can see how the jury views the facts.

The impact on damages is less clear. Insurers say the end of phantom damages is producing more realistic settlement numbers, and some are using the law to justify lower opening offers. Lower offers are pushing more injured people toward court instead of settlement, according to Atlanta personal injury firm Cheeley Law Group. The firm notes that Georgia's existing offer-of-settlement statute “can make settlement decisions more consequential,” since a rejected offer that turns out to be reasonable can now carry real financial penalties.

SB 69’s rules around litigation financing disclosure are newer, so there's less to judge them by. The registration requirement didn't become mandatory until Jan. 1, 2026, so few cases have tested it yet. Discovery into funding agreements is already changing pretrial strategy in cases involving outside capital, which gives defense counsel a new way to find out who's truly funding a lawsuit and why.

While constitutional challenges haven't hit yet, SB 68 was built expecting them. Attorneys at Copeland, Stair, Valz & Lovell flagged the exposure as soon as it passed, writing that the bill faces likely challenges, “particularly on constitutional grounds related to due process, equal protection, and the right to a jury trial.” Eighteen months later, no such case has reached a Georgia appellate court. Whether that's because the reforms are holding up, or because plaintiffs' attorneys are still choosing their ground, is still unclear.

Whether any of this brings down insurance costs is also still unresolved among the reform's own backers. The figures behind the economic case, a $1,415 annual “tort tax” per resident and a related loss of roughly 135,000 jobs a year, didn't originate with the state. They came from an Insurance Information Institute campaign that ran ahead of the bill's passage, numbers Kemp's office and reform advocates later adopted as the case for the law. Plaintiffs' attorneys and some consumer advocates argue lower verdicts don't automatically mean lower premiums, and that insurers still haven't released public data linking the two. Eighteen months in, nobody on either side has produced numbers proving it either way.

A Test Case the Rest of the Country Is Watching

Georgia isn't reforming alone. Florida moved first by passing HB 837 in 2023. Texas tried to follow when Senate Bill 30 passed 20-11 in April 2025, but died in conference committee two months later when the House and Senate versions couldn't be reconciled. The Bassett Firm's postmortem called the collapse a sign of “the current political ceiling for major tort reform in the state of Texas.” Georgia's bill made it all the way to Kemp's desk. Best Lawyers called the signing “a warning shot across the national litigation landscape” the week it happened, and 18 months later, other states' results are still being measured against it.

That matters beyond Georgia's borders. National insurers price risk across state lines, and litigation shops nationally build strategy off wherever precedent originates. If Georgia's bifurcation and disclosure rules survive legal challenge and produce the predictability their sponsors promised, other states with their own “hellhole” reputations are likely to borrow Georgia's statutory language directly rather than start from scratch.

What It Means for Firms and the Clients They Represent

For businesses operating in Georgia, the shift is in how risk gets priced and managed. Premises liability exposure, especially around negligent security, is narrower than before, which should factor into security spending, insurance coverage and litigation reserves going forward. But narrower isn't gone: businesses still need airtight documentation of their own security practices to benefit from the law's protections.

For law firms, the reforms are reshaping practice group strategy. Personal injury defense teams are building trial plans around bifurcation as a default, not an exception. Insurance coverage groups are watching the phantom damages rules closely, since they touch nearly every bodily injury claim in the state. Firms with a commercial litigation or funding practice have a genuinely new area to build expertise in, given how unfamiliar litigation-financing discovery still is to most Georgia courts.

Associates trained entirely in a pre-reform Georgia, where anchoring and phantom damages were standard tools, now need real reps under the new rules before they can run a case alone. Firms that treated the reform as a memo to circulate rather than a skill to teach are already behind.

Appellate courts haven't yet weighed in meaningfully on how these provisions hold up under pressure. But for now, Georgia's courtroom experiment is producing exactly what its architects wanted: a system that behaves differently than it did 18 months ago.

Whether it behaves more fairly remains to be seen, and the rest of the country is watching for an answer.