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It seems that unfortunately Georgia’s SB 68 is not going anywhere. It has the support of the Governor, a legislative supermajority, and the state’s most powerful business lobbies. Anyone who frames the conversation as “repeal vs. keep” is missing the point — and missing an opportunity. The more productive question is this: now that the law is in effect, what can Georgia’s legislators do to honor its legitimate goals while addressing the serious harms it has caused?
The good news is that the most significant problems with SB 68 are fixable. They do not require dismantling the entire reform. They require targeted, surgical amendments that restore basic fairness to the people the law left behind — without returning Georgia’s courts to the nuclear verdict era that justified the reform in the first place. What follows are seven concrete proposals that deserve serious legislative attention in the 2026 session and beyond.
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The most urgent fix is also the simplest. By creating a sex trafficking exception to the new negligent security framework, the legislature already admitted that the new standard was too broad. That admission must be followed by action. Georgia should immediately extend civil claim protections to a broader class of crime victims who deserve access to the courts:
This is not a radical expansion of liability. It is a restoration of protections that existed under Georgia law for decades and that were removed, apparently without adequate consideration of who would be left unprotected. A “vulnerable victim” amendment to SB 68 — modeled on the existing sex trafficking carve-out — would be a straightforward, bipartisan fix that restores justice without undermining the rest of the reform.
The phantom damages reform contained a hidden injustice that its authors may not have fully appreciated: it created a two-tiered system in which insured plaintiffs recover less than uninsured plaintiffs for the same injury. This needs to be corrected, and the correction is straightforward.
Georgia should amend the medical damages cap to define recoverable medical expenses as “the total amount the plaintiff was legally obligated to pay, including any amounts paid by a health insurance carrier on the plaintiff’s behalf.” This formulation eliminates the phantom of inflated chargemaster rates — which no one actually pays — while ensuring that having health insurance does not reduce a victim’s compensable losses. It also ensures that health insurers cannot use the reform to enrich themselves at injured plaintiffs’ expense by covering a claim at a reduced cost while the defendant’s liability is capped at that same reduced figure.
The goal of tort reform should be accuracy — making sure verdicts reflect real-world costs. A reform that deliberately undercompensates people who responsibly maintained health insurance is not accurate. It is punitive.
Tort reform was sold to Georgia’s public on a simple promise: reduce lawsuit costs, and insurance premiums will fall. That promise has not been kept in other states that enacted similar reforms, and there is currently no mechanism in Georgia law to ensure it will be kept here. The 2026 session should address this with a straightforward accountability measure.
Georgia should require insurers operating in the state to report annually — to the Office of Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner — on litigation cost trends, claims reserve changes, and the financial impact of SB 68’s key provisions. The Commissioner should be authorized to consider this data when evaluating proposed rate increases. And the legislature should commit to a formal review, no later than 2028, to evaluate whether the promised premium relief has materialized. If it has not, the legislature should be prepared to revisit the statute.
This is not a radical intervention in insurance markets. It is the basic accountability that the public was owed from the beginning. If the insurance industry’s lobbying campaign for SB 68 was honest — if the premium savings were real and not merely projected — then this reporting requirement should present no difficulty.
Bifurcated trials were presented as a tool for procedural efficiency. In practice, they have become a tool for overwhelming plaintiffs with procedural complexity. The current rule allows any defendant to demand bifurcation in cases over $150,000, giving well-resourced defendants the ability to force multi-phase trials in virtually every serious injury case.
The legislature should amend the bifurcation provision to give trial judges meaningful discretion to deny requests where the separation of liability and damages would be inefficient, wasteful, or would prejudice a party without corresponding benefit. Judges should also be permitted to consider whether a bifurcation request is being made in good faith for procedural reasons or as a litigation tactic to increase costs and pressure a settlement. Properly calibrated, bifurcation can be a useful procedural tool. As currently drafted, it tilts the playing field against plaintiffs in almost every high-value case.
The new negligent security framework was designed to reduce frivolous claims against property owners — and there is merit in that goal. But the law’s current structure primarily rewards property owners for calling 911 and documenting their compliance with baseline legal requirements. It does not affirmatively reward the kind of genuine, proactive safety investment that actually keeps tenants and customers safe.
Georgia should create a “certified safe premises” standard: property owners who voluntarily meet defined security benchmarks — lighting standards, staffing levels, surveillance systems, regular third-party safety audits — receive a presumption against liability in negligent security cases. This approach transforms the reform’s energy from simply making it harder to sue into actively encouraging better safety behavior. It rewards investment rather than mere legal defensibility. A modest state technical assistance program helping small landlords and small businesses meet those standards would extend the benefit to property owners who want to do the right thing but lack the resources to know how.
The most important improvement the legislature can make requires no amendment to SB 68 at all. It requires only the political will to measure whether the law is working as promised.
Georgia should enact a standalone statute requiring the Governor’s Office, in collaboration with the Georgia Courts Commission and the Office of Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner, to produce a public report by 2028 addressing, at minimum:
A mandatory review is not a threat to the reform. It is a demonstration of confidence. If SB 68 is working as promised, the data will show it — and that evidence will strengthen the case for the law and for the coalition that passed it. If it is not working, or if it is causing harms that outweigh its benefits, Georgia deserves to know. Legislating without accountability is not reform. It is a bet made with someone else’s money — and in this case, the someone else is the Georgian who was injured, who followed the rules, and who trusted the system to be there when they needed it.
The civil justice system is not a gift to trial lawyers. It is the mechanism by which ordinary people hold powerful institutions accountable when those institutions injure them. Every time that mechanism is weakened, the institutions get a little safer — not safer for the public, but safer from the consequences of their own negligence.
Georgia’s tort reform addressed some real problems with real tools. But it also stripped away decades of hard-won protections from people who needed them most. The legislature has the knowledge, the authority, and the obligation to correct what went wrong. The question is whether it has the will. For more information on Georgia’s Tort Reform or for assistance with a personal injury case, contact Chattahoochee Injury Law today.
This two-part series analyzed Georgia’s SB 68 and SB 69, signed into law on April 21, 2025. This analysis draws on legislative records, legal commentary, and published research. It does not constitute legal advice.
