Appeals Court Throws a Wrench into Part of Georgia’s 2025 Tort-Reform Law

When Georgia’s tort-reform law was approved in 2025 property/casualty insurance interests hailed it as a long-awaited measure that would help stem lawsuit abuse and excessive jury awards in the state.

But in the first appellate court test of the law, the Georgia Court of Appeals last week threw a wrench into the meaning and intent of the statute, allowing testimony about the extent of an injury during the first phase of a lawsuit trial.

“I do believe this is contrary to the intent of the law. This is not what we expected on the defense side when the reforms came out,” said Gillian Crowl-Parrish, of Atlanta, an insurance defense attorney with the Swift Currie law firm.

The 2025 Georgia law, unlike tort-reform efforts in a few other states, does not place monetary caps on damages. Instead, it requires courts to split injury lawsuits into three phases: In phase one, the jury determines only the fault level of each defendant. If fault is found, in the second phase the jury looks at the extent of the injury and determines the amount of compensatory damages.

In the third phase of the trial, the jury examines punitive damages and attorney fees.

In Transcontinental Carriers vs. Bennett, a judge in Spalding County in 2025—just after the tort-reform law took effect—allowed an injured truck driver’s attorneys in the first phase of the trial to introduce evidence of the type and extent of the man’s injuries. The at-fault defendant, a driver for Transcontinental, was diabetic and had failed to monitor his insulin levels, the injured motorist’s team argued. The diabetic truck driver had drifted into Bennett’s vehicle and ran him into a guardrail in the 2020 incident.

The case was notable for another reason: It may be one of the last suits to name the trucking company’s insurance company directly. In this case, it was Occidental Fire & Casualty Insurance. Georgia lawmakers in 2024 ended direct-action suits against insurers except in cases in which the motor carrier is insolvent or can’t be found or served.

In the Bennett lawsuit, Occidental and Transcontinental objected to the lower court allowing testimony about Bennett’s apparent spinal injury and surgery, contending that the information prejudiced the jury and should have been left for a later phase of the trial. The jury awarded $7 million in damages and $1.5 million in attorney fees.

Occidental and Transcontinental appealed. In its Sept. 9 opinion, the Court of Appeals panel noted that the 2025 tort-reform law, Statute 51-12-15, and other statutes allow phase-one information about the injuries to help a jury determine fault.

“Defendants’ strategy was to argue that the impact of Bennett’s truck with the guardrail was insufficient as a matter of law to be the proximate cause of this injury and constellation of symptoms,” appellate court Judge Anne Elizabeth Barnes wrote in the opinion. “But a contention that an impact was ‘too minor’ to amount to the proximate cause of Bennett’s injuries was for the jury, not the trial court, to resolve, going as it did to the question of ‘fault’ in phase one.”

The appellate judges rejected the insurer’s contention that allowing evidence of the persistence of plaintiff’s injuries “eviscerated” the statute.

“On the contrary, the trifurcation enforced by this trial court excluded the jury from hearing any evidence as to the extent of ‘compensatory damages’ until the second phase of the trial, such that the jury would consider ‘fault’ for plural ‘injuries’ alone, without any foreknowledge of the extent of the compensation sought, in its first phase,” the decision reads.

Because under Georgia law, “proving fault requires proving both injuries and proximate causation under the facts of an individual case, this trial court did not abuse its discretion when it authorized Bennett to detail his injuries and their extent in the aftermath of the accident at issue in the first phase of this trial.”

Crowl-Parrish disagreed.

“I do think it will prejudice a jury” to hear about injuries early in the trial, she said. “The benefit of trifurcation is to have the jury focus on liability without potentially being colored by the emotional issues and other issues that have external impacts.”

A lawyer for the insurance and trucking companies in the Bennett case declined to comment about the chances of an appeal to the state’s Supreme court, and other attorneys in the case could not be reached for comment Monday afternoon. If the appellate court decision stands, insurers may have little choice but to be prepared for plaintiffs who may introduce grisly details about an injury or death caused by an accident. Not every case needs to be trifurcated, Crowl-Parrish noted.

The opinion can be seen here.

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