Personal Injury and Tort Reform: Current Developments, Effectiveness, How Parties Adapt and Respond

This CLE webinar will discuss recent developments in tort reform and their impact on personal injury cases from the perspective of both plaintiffs and defendants.

For several decades now, the defense bar has promoted the need to “reform” tort law to eliminate perceived problems or abuses. Most recently, Florida, in 2023, and Georgia, in 2025, enacted very different but expansive tort reforms making both procedural and substantive changes that, among other things, affect statutes of limitation, pleading requirements, separate liability and damages phases of trial, alter causes of action, and more. Louisiana, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Oklahoma have also passed various tort reform statutes directed as discreet issues. Another recent trend in tort reform is filing RICO suits against specific plaintiffs firms and their preferred medical providers for allegedly perpetuating fraudulent claims. 

Some jurisdictions, however, have declined to adopt these types of changes for numerous reasons. Although opponents of tort reform may agree that certain tort reform goals are proper, they strongly quesiton whether procedures imposed by tort reform actually accomplish those goal without harming injured parties, or whether there is a way to measure effectiveness. 

Listen as our esteemed panel reviews the history of tort reform, procedural and substantive changes implemented by statute or judicial precedent in various jurisdictions, reasons why tort reform has been rejected in others, how changes are enforced, the practical effectiveness of these measures on the perceived problems they were intended to address, unintended consequences, how plaintiffs and defendants have adjusted, and more.