When Georgia enacted Senate Bills 68 and 69 in April 2025, the legislature created a three-phase trial structure that the defense bar argued would functionally keep damages evidence away from juries until after they decided fault. The first significant appellate test of that structure produced an outcome that surprised defense practitioners. In a September 9, 2026 decision, the Georgia Court of Appeals held that a plaintiff could present detailed testimony about the extent and persistence of his spinal injuries during Phase 1 (the liability phase) because that evidence was necessary to establish proximate causation.
The case, Transcontinental Carriers and Occidental Fire & Casualty Insurance v. Bennett (Ga. Ct. App. 2026), arose from a truck-crash injury in which plaintiff Bennett suffered a spinal injury requiring surgery. At trial, the defendant trucking company and its insurer moved to exclude testimony about the nature and extent of the injuries during Phase 1, arguing that injury evidence was reserved for Phase 2 under the trifurcation structure. The trial court denied the motion and allowed the testimony. The defense appealed.
The Structure SB 68 Created
Georgia's SB 68, effective for cases filed after February 16, 2026, requires civil trials to proceed in three separate phases. Phase 1 addresses fault: the jury determines whether each defendant is liable and assigns fault percentages to all parties. If liability is found, Phase 2 addresses the extent of injury and the amount of compensatory damages. Phase 3, if needed, addresses punitive damages separately.
The defense argued that this structure necessarily required courts to exclude all injury evidence from Phase 1. If the jury cannot hear about damages in Phase 1, the argument went, it should not hear about injuries either, because injury evidence inherently signals damages magnitude to the jury, which is the anchoring problem the reform was designed to prevent.
The Court's Holding
Judge Anne Elizabeth Barnes, writing for the Court of Appeals panel, rejected this reading of the statute. Proving fault, the court held, requires proving both that an injury occurred and that the defendant's conduct proximately caused it. Those are causation questions, not damages questions. A jury cannot determine whether a trucking company's negligence proximately caused harm to a plaintiff without understanding what harm the plaintiff actually suffered.
The panel pointed to O.C.G.A. § 51-12-15 and other existing Georgia tort statutes that permit evidence of injury persistence and extent to inform the causation analysis, and held that SB 68's Phase 1 structure did not displace those provisions. What Phase 1 excludes, under the court's reading, is evidence about the compensation the plaintiff seeks: the dollar value of pain and suffering, future medical costs, and similar damages-magnitude evidence. Testimony about the fact and nature of a spinal injury and the surgery required to treat it is causation evidence, not damages evidence, and is admissible in Phase 1.
What This Means for Plaintiff Strategy in Georgia
The ruling preserves significant ground for plaintiff counsel in Georgia trials. Even under the trifurcation structure, plaintiffs can present medical testimony describing the injury mechanism, the diagnosis, the surgical intervention, and ongoing functional limitations in Phase 1 as part of establishing that the defendant's conduct caused harm. What remains constrained to Phase 2 is damages valuation: the per-diem argument, the life expectancy multiplier, the aggregate non-economic damages demand.
The practical difference is substantial. A jury that has heard detailed testimony about a spinal fracture, a multi-level fusion surgery, and a plaintiff's ongoing disability has a frame of reference that will inform how it assigns fault percentages in Phase 1, even before it formally addresses damages in Phase 2. This is precisely what the defense bar flagged, and the court's response was that causation inquiry cannot be separated from injury evidence without making it impossible for plaintiffs to establish their claims at all.
For plaintiffs with commercial vehicle cases in Georgia, the ruling is immediately useful. The evidence package for Phase 1 can include the plaintiff's complete injury narrative, including surgical records, rehabilitation course, and residual functional limitations, provided the presentation is framed around causation rather than damages demand. Defense counsel will continue to contest the line between admissible causation evidence and inadmissible damages evidence, and pretrial motion practice on that line will be intensive in cases tried under SB 68 over the next year.
The Defense Reaction and What Comes Next
Defense practitioners have characterized the ruling as contrary to legislative intent and inconsistent with the structure SB 68 was designed to create. Several defense-side commentators expect the case to be appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, which has discretionary review authority over Court of Appeals decisions.
If the Georgia Supreme Court grants review, the central question will be whether O.C.G.A. § 51-12-15 and related evidentiary statutes survive alongside SB 68's trifurcation requirements, or whether the legislature's intent in creating Phase 1 was broad enough to displace prior standards on injury-related causation testimony. A grant of certiorari would likely produce the definitive interpretation of Phase 1 scope before the end of 2027.
Until the Georgia Supreme Court acts, Transcontinental Carriers v. Bennett is the controlling authority in Georgia. For practitioners building their Phase 1 presentation in Georgia cases, the tactical takeaway is to frame every injury exhibit and every medical witness explicitly in terms of causation: not what the injury cost, but what it is and how the defendant caused it. For broader tracking of significant PI case law developments as this decision moves through the appellate system, monitor both the Georgia Supreme Court's certiorari docket and subsequent trial court orders applying the ruling.