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On April 21, 2025, Governor Brian Kemp signed Senate Bills 68 and 69 into law, ushering in Georgia’s most sweeping civil justice overhaul in a generation. The legislation was framed as a business-friendly corrective — a way to rein in what proponents called a culture of lawsuit abuse. But for the injured workers, crime victims, nursing home residents, and ordinary families who depend on the civil justice system as their last line of recourse against powerful institutions, SB 68 is not a correction. For many, it is the door to civil justice slammed shut, as discussed further below.
Before examining what the law actually does to real people, it is important to acknowledge what its supporters got right. Georgia’s litigation environment had grown genuinely problematic. Nuclear verdicts — jury awards in the hundreds of millions — had become more common. Third-party litigation financiers, including some based overseas, had been funding speculative lawsuits as investment vehicles. These were real issues deserving a legislative response. But good problems can have bad solutions, and SB 68 is a law that accomplishes some legitimate goals while inflicting serious collateral damage on people who had nothing to do with the abuses it was meant to address.
If you are in need of legal assistance, contact our Savannah, GA personal injury lawyer today.
Start with the reform’s most glaring internal contradiction. SB 68 caps medical damage recovery at the amounts actually paid by a plaintiff’s health insurer — not the full amount billed. On the surface, this sounds like common sense: why should a plaintiff recover inflated hospital chargemaster rates that no one actually pays? But the law’s drafters appear to have ignored what happens to the people on the other side of that equation.
A plaintiff with good health insurance — whose insurer negotiated the bill down to 40 cents on the dollar — can now only recover that discounted amount in court. A plaintiff with no health insurance, who owes the full billed amount, faces no such cap. The law has created two separate classes of injury victims: those with insurance, who are compensated for less, and those without insurance, who are compensated for more. The people who did the responsible thing — who paid their premiums, maintained their coverage, planned ahead — are now penalized in civil court for that responsibility.
The people who played by the rules — who paid insurance premiums month after month — now receive less compensation for their injuries than the people who did not. That is not reform. That is a punishment for personal responsibility.
There is an additional dimension that the law’s proponents did not acknowledge: the savings from reduced phantom damages do not flow to injured plaintiffs. They flow to insurance companies, which retain the windfall of covering a claim while the defendant’s liability exposure is capped at a lower figure. In practical terms, SB 68 represents a transfer of wealth from injured Georgians to the insurance industry under the auspices of legal reform.
The most morally troubling consequence of SB 68 is its effect on victims of violent crime. Georgia’s negligent security law previously held property owners — hotels, apartment complexes, bars, parking garages — to an “extraordinary care” standard when it came to foreseeable criminal acts on their premises. That standard had developed over decades of case law for a simple reason: businesses that operate in high-crime areas, that profit from attracting customers and tenants, have a responsibility to take safety seriously.
SB 68 replaced this with a much narrower “ordinary care” standard and added a sweeping set of affirmative defenses that effectively insulate property owners from liability in most violent crime cases. The legislature acknowledged, somewhat awkwardly, that the new standard would eliminate civil claims for sex trafficking victims on business premises — and carved out an exception for them.
But the carve-out stops there. Consider the real-world scenarios that critics raised during legislative debate: a child sexually assaulted at a motel where the management had ignored prior reports of predatory behavior; a woman raped in a poorly lit parking garage whose management had received complaints about the lighting for months; an elderly nursing home resident beaten by a staff member whose history of violence was known to the facility. Under the old law, these victims had a civil case. Under SB 68, they very likely do not.
During hearings on the bill, a trial attorney submitted a public letter that has since circulated widely in Georgia legal circles:
“How can lawmakers acknowledge that the new laws would bar the civil claims of a 14-year-old sold for sex and make an exception for that, but leave the same 14-year-old with no recourse if she was raped, tortured, killed? Where is ‘equal justice under law’ in these new laws?”
The answer, unfortunately, is that the bill was shaped largely by the business and insurance lobbies, and those lobbies’ interest in reducing liability exposure does not align with a rape survivor’s interest in holding her attacker’s enablers accountable.
Civil liability has always served two functions in our legal system: compensating victims and deterring unsafe behavior. When a hotel knows that failing to maintain its security systems creates potential for multimillion-dollar verdicts, it has a powerful financial incentive to hire adequate staff, fix broken locks, and keep parking lots lit. When that exposure is dramatically reduced — as SB 68 has reduced it — the financial calculus changes.
This is not speculation. Research examining tort reform in other states has documented measurable increases in unsafe conditions in industries where liability was curtailed. Florida’s medical malpractice reforms in the early 2000s were followed by documented declines in certain patient safety metrics. Georgia’s property owners now face reduced legal risk from failing to protect tenants and customers. That reduced risk has a cost — and it will be borne by the next victim of a crime that could have been prevented.
The Georgia Rights Alliance, which tracked the bill closely, put it plainly: insurers and large property management companies stood to gain hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced liability exposure. None of them offered binding commitments to share those savings with the public in the form of lower rents, improved security budgets, or reduced insurance premiums. The gains were privatized. The risks were transferred to ordinary Georgians.
Beyond the substantive changes, SB 68 introduced a series of procedural reforms — bifurcated trials, discovery stays, restrictions on voluntary dismissals — that were framed as tools for efficiency and fairness. In practice, they systematically favor defendants with the resources to litigate long and complex cases.
Bifurcated and trifurcated trials — where liability, compensatory damages, and punitive damages are decided in separate phases — may sound like neutral procedural choices. But they impose significant additional costs on plaintiffs and their attorneys, who must prepare for and try multiple phases of the same case. For large corporations with in-house litigation departments and deep litigation budgets, this complexity is manageable. For an injured worker, a small family suing after a wrongful death, or a survivor of institutional negligence who is working with a contingency-fee attorney, the additional procedural burden can be crushing. Cases that might otherwise resolve in reasonable settlements now require far more time and resources — resources that injured plaintiffs rarely have and corporations always do. For more information on Georgia’s Tort Reform or for assistance with a personal injury case, contact Chattahoochee Injury Law today.
Next in this series: Part 2 examines what Georgia’s legislature should do now — concrete, achievable reforms that could restore balance without abandoning the legitimate goals of SB 68.
