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Georgia’s SB 68 is now law, and the courts have begun the long process of interpreting its provisions. The first two installments of this series documented what the reform accomplished and where it fell short. This final piece asks the harder question: what should come next? The goal is not to relitigate the politics of tort reform or to return Georgia to the “Judicial Hellhole” conditions that triggered the legislation in the first place. Rather, it is to identify targeted, bipartisan improvements that could preserve the law’s core benefits while correcting its most serious injustices.
Georgia legislators and Governor Kemp now have an opportunity that reformers often squander: the chance to learn from implementation. The following proposals are organized by theme and draw on the concerns raised by critics across the political spectrum.
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The single most urgent fix is also the most straightforward. The legislature acknowledged — by creating a sex trafficking exception — that the new negligent security framework would otherwise eliminate legitimate claims by victims of violent crime on business premises. That acknowledgment is an implicit admission that the framework went too far. The fix is to extend protections already afforded to sex trafficking survivors to a broader class of crime victims, including:
This is not a radical proposal. It is a correction of what appears to have been an oversight — or at minimum, an underestimation of the breadth of harm the new negligent security standards would cause. Creating a broader “vulnerable victim” carve-out would restore the civil justice system’s role as a backstop for Georgia’s most vulnerable citizens while preserving the reform’s benefits for ordinary commercial property disputes.
The law’s perverse treatment of insured plaintiffs — who can recover less than uninsured plaintiffs because their health insurance negotiated discounts — is not only unfair, it is bad policy. It penalizes people for doing the responsible thing and creates an incentive, at the margins, to drop health coverage or avoid using it. Legislators should amend the phantom damages provision to allow plaintiffs to recover the full amount they were obligated to pay under their insurance plan — including co-pays, deductibles, and out-of-pocket maximums — rather than just what the insurer paid.
A simple fix: define recoverable medical damages as the “amount the plaintiff was legally required to pay, including any amount satisfied by health insurance on the plaintiff’s behalf.” This preserves the legitimate goal of eliminating the phantom of inflated chargemaster rates while ensuring that insured plaintiffs are not penalized relative to uninsured ones. It also ensures that the savings from reduced phantom damages are not simply transferred from patients to insurance companies.
The central promise of tort reform — lower insurance rates — should be enforceable, not merely aspirational. Georgia should establish a formal mechanism for tracking whether reduced litigation costs translate into consumer savings. Options include:
This is reasonable public policy. If the premise of the legislation was that high insurance costs were being driven by lawsuit abuse, then the success of the legislation should be measurable. Accountability mechanisms protect consumers and prevent the reform from becoming, as critics fear, simply a wealth transfer from accident victims to insurance company shareholders.
The decision to apply most of SB 68 immediately to pending cases was legally aggressive and arguably unfair to plaintiffs who had made litigation decisions under the old rules. Going forward, Georgia should adopt the approach used in Florida and most other states that have enacted tort reform: new substantive rules should apply to causes of action arising after the effective date, not to cases already in the pipeline.
For provisions that are genuinely procedural in nature — such as the discovery stay and the restrictions on voluntary dismissal — immediate application may be defensible. But for changes that alter substantive rights, such as the phantom damages cap and the new negligent security standards, prospective application is the appropriate approach. The legislature should clarify this in a technical corrections bill and, where possible, protect plaintiffs whose cases were pending at the time the law changed.
Bifurcated and trifurcated trials were sold as efficiency tools, but implementation is revealing their complexity. The current rule allows any party to request bifurcation in cases over $150,000 — meaning defendants can almost always force multi-phase trials in serious injury cases. Several improvements would make this a more balanced tool:
The goal of bifurcation was to prevent juries from making liability determinations through an emotional lens colored by a plaintiff’s suffering. That is a legitimate goal. But it should not become a tool for systematically insulating defendants from the full human consequences of their negligence.
The new negligent security law created several affirmative defenses for property owners, including one that makes reporting a threat to law enforcement a complete defense to liability. This is the right instinct: property owners should be rewarded for proactive safety behaviors. But the law could go further to actually encourage investment in safety rather than simply shielding inaction:
This approach would channel the energy of the reform toward the goal that everyone claims to share — safer properties — rather than simply making it harder for victims to sue after harm has occurred.
Perhaps the most important structural improvement is one that the legislature can enact before a single case is decided under the new law: a mandatory, data-driven review process. Georgia should require that the Governor’s Office, in collaboration with the Georgia Courts Commission and the Office of Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner, produce a public report by 2028 that addresses:
A review mechanism does not require anyone to pre-judge the law’s success or failure. It simply requires honesty about outcomes. If the law is working as promised, the data will show it, and that will strengthen the case for the reform. If it is not working — or is producing harms that outweigh its benefits — Georgia lawmakers should have the information they need to act. Legislating without accountability is not reform; it is a gamble at the public’s expense.
Georgia’s 2025 tort reform is a significant achievement, and its architects deserve credit for taking on a genuine problem that had been allowed to fester for two decades. The state’s legal climate was genuinely out of balance, and SB 68 and SB 69 took meaningful steps to address that imbalance. The phantom damages reform is sound policy. The litigation financing transparency rules are long overdue. The curbs on anchoring and double attorney’s fees recovery address documented abuses.
But good policy is not static. The mark of a genuinely successful reform is not whether it passes — it is whether it produces the promised benefits while minimizing unintended harm. On that score, Georgia’s tort reform is a work in progress. The victims who were left without recourse deserve a legislative response. The insured Georgians who were inadvertently penalized deserve a correction. And every Georgian who was promised lower insurance rates deserves accountability.
“The goal is not a legal system that favors defendants or plaintiffs — it is a system that is fair to both. Georgia’s reform took the first step. The harder work of refining what was built is just beginning.”
The 2026 legislative session is an opportunity. Whether Georgia’s lawmakers are willing to revisit and improve a law they fought hard to pass will be a test of whether this was genuine reform or political theater. The evidence, so far, points toward genuine effort — but the details still need work. For more information on Georgia’s Tort Reform or for assistance with a personal injury case, contact Chattahoochee Injury Law today.
This three-part series analyzed Georgia’s SB 68 and SB 69, signed into law on April 21, 2025. This analysis draws on legal commentary, legislative records, and reporting from multiple sources. It reflects analysis as of February 2026 and does not constitute legal advice.
