Midsummer check-in: reform is no longer theoretical
For two years the personal-injury bar has talked about tort reform as something coming. As of this summer it has arrived, and the effects are showing up in filing decisions, trial structure, and settlement posture across several large states at once. This is our midsummer read on what is actually moving, drawn from recent appellate rulings, new statutes taking effect, and the verdict and settlement numbers that closed out the second quarter.
Georgia's SB 68 and SB 69 start to bite
The Georgia reforms Governor Brian Kemp signed in April 2025 are now operational, and they are the most consequential structural change plaintiffs' firms face this year. Three provisions stand out. First, in any bodily-injury or wrongful-death case with damages over $150,000, any party may elect to bifurcate the trial, splitting liability from damages. Defense counsel will use this aggressively, and plaintiffs' firms are rebuilding their trial narratives to survive a jury that decides fault before it ever hears the full human cost of the injury.
Second, seatbelt non-use is now admissible in Georgia, reversing a long-standing exclusion. Expect it as a comparative-fault argument in every auto and trucking case, and prepare clients and treating physicians to address the causation of specific injuries rather than conceding the point. Third, third-party litigation funders must register with the state as of January 1, 2026, and funding contracts now carry disclosure obligations and potential joint-and-several exposure for frivolous litigation. Firms that rely on case financing should read the registration rules closely before their next funded intake.
California quietly narrows survival damages
While Georgia grabbed the headlines, California let a significant expansion expire. The Senate Bill 447 window that allowed estates to recover a decedent's pre-death pain and suffering in survival actions sunset on January 1, 2026. Under the restored Code of Civil Procedure section 377.34, only survival actions filed before that date preserve those non-economic damages, and the date of injury or death is irrelevant. The result is a filing-date cliff that has already reshaped the value of pending death cases and pushed some firms to accelerate filings in late 2025. We covered the practitioner implications in our wrongful-death reporting this week.
Texas tightens the screws on premises plaintiffs
On April 10, 2026, the Supreme Court of Texas decided H-E-B, L.P. v. Peterson, No. 24-0310, reinstating summary judgment against a shopper who slipped on a clear liquid in a store aisle. The court reaffirmed that constructive notice demands proof of how long the specific hazard existed at the specific location, and it rejected reliance on unrelated leaks elsewhere in the store or on generalized inspection policies. The ruling is a reminder that in most jurisdictions the burden to clock the hazard sits squarely on the plaintiff, and it will be cited well beyond Texas. Our slip-and-fall desk broke down the evidentiary playbook the decision now demands.
Florida's HB 837 is still setting the terms
Florida's 2023 overhaul continues to define practice in the state. The two-year statute of limitations for negligence and the shift to a modified comparative-fault bar, under which a plaintiff found more than 50 percent at fault recovers nothing, remain the dominant facts of any Florida intake. Three years in, the effect is visible in the numbers: cleaner liability cases are commanding a premium, and marginal-fault cases that would once have settled for nuisance value are being declined at intake. The reform did not end litigation in Florida. It sorted it.
The verdicts tell the other half of the story
If reform is compressing the low end, the high end is doing something very different. The second quarter produced eye-watering numbers that show juries, where they still reach damages, remain willing to punish.
- An Orange County, Florida jury returned roughly $644.7 million against the owners and operators of a Winter Park bar after a patron suffered catastrophic injuries in a fall on the venue's staircase, one of the largest premises-liability verdicts on record.
- Ohio State University agreed in June 2026 to pay $100 million to resolve claims by nearly 300 former students arising from decades-old campus-physician abuse.
- The Archdiocese of San Francisco proposed a $395 million settlement to resolve more than 500 abuse claims in bankruptcy, reportedly the largest ever reached by a Catholic diocese in that posture.
The through-line is a widening gap. Reform is squeezing volume and pushing down the value of contested-liability cases, while catastrophic-injury and institutional-abuse matters with clear liability keep producing historically large recoveries. The middle is thinning and the tails are fattening.
The reform coalition is coordinating across states
None of this is happening in isolation. Insurers and defense-side trade groups that spent years building the case against so-called nuclear verdicts now have a template, and Georgia is it. Legislators in several other states have floated bills that borrow directly from the Georgia package: an elective bifurcation right pegged to a damages threshold, the reversal of seatbelt-exclusion rules, and registration and disclosure mandates for third-party litigation funders. The through-argument is consistent from state to state, that outsized damages awards feed insurance-premium inflation, and it is landing with legislatures that were unreceptive only a few sessions ago.
Whether the empirical claim holds is contested, and plaintiffs' economists dispute the premium-inflation story vigorously. What is not contested is the political momentum. Firms with multistate dockets should assume that a version of the Georgia bifurcation right will reach at least one more of their jurisdictions within the next two legislative cycles, and should plan trial strategy as though a liability-only phase is the likely default rather than the exception.
What the plaintiffs' bar is doing about it
The response on the plaintiffs' side is falling into three buckets. The first is procedural: challenging bifurcation elections case by case, arguing that liability and damages are too intertwined to sever cleanly, particularly where the mechanism of injury is itself evidence of the harm. The second is evidentiary discipline, front-loading the work of preserving telematics, surveillance, and inspection records so that a liability-only phase can be won on documents rather than on sympathy. The third is selection, tightening intake to concentrate resources on the clean-liability, high-damages cases that still command full value even under the new rules.
The common thread is that reform rewards preparation and punishes volume. The firms that treated a large docket of marginal cases as an asset are finding that many of those files no longer clear the fault bars or justify the cost of a bifurcated trial. The firms built around a smaller book of well-worked cases are, if anything, in a stronger position than they were before the reforms landed.
What it means for the second half
Several practical themes fall out of the quarter for firm operators and trial lawyers alike.
Case selection is now a reform-driven discipline
In modified comparative-fault states, marginal-liability files are liabilities of their own. Intake criteria that ignore the new fault bars will fill a docket with cases that cannot clear the threshold. Expect the strongest firms to get pickier, not busier.
Trial structure is a first-order strategic choice
Georgia's bifurcation right means plaintiffs' counsel must be able to win a liability-only phase without leaning on sympathy, then prove damages to a jury already invested in its own verdict. That is a different craft, and firms are already retooling voir dire and case-in-chief accordingly.
Evidence preservation wins premises and auto cases
Peterson and its cousins reward the firm that moves on surveillance and inspection records in the first week. The temporal record is not something you argue at trial; it is something you capture, or lose, on intake.
We will keep tracking these threads as the statutes mature and the appellate courts fill in the gaps. For the rulings behind the headlines, follow our case-law and settlements coverage.