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 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 Trans
continental, 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.
Watch More Image Part 2 >>>
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 Eli
zabeth 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.
