Introduction

Product liability law in Georgia has undergone significant changes in the past few years, led by the first major revisions to the state’s product liability statutes in two decades. Long a priority of Governor Brian Kemp, a pair of bills enacted by the Georgia General Assembly in 2025 limit certain evidence, change how damages can be calculated, and regulate outside funding of litigation. Coupled with important court decisions on issues such as the statute of repose in claims involving injury from long-term use of a product and how a third-party’s wrongful use of a product impacts an injured person’s claim, there are a number of key developments of which both lawyers and companies should be aware.

Changes to Georgia’s Product Liability and Related Statutes

At the start of the 2025 legislative session, Governor Kemp announced that “tort reform,” or changes to the laws that regulate claims for personal injury and product damage, was his top priority. He argued that current laws unfairly favoured plaintiffs and giant jury awards – and the threat of such awards – have led to skyrocketing insurance premiums and have hurt efforts to recruit businesses to the state. The result was a pair of bills making major changes to many aspects of personal injury litigation, including medical malpractice and premises liability. Tort reform advocates hailed the new laws, with the American Tort Reform Association removing Georgia from its annual “Judicial Hellholes” list of jurisdictions it considers unfavourable to corporate defendants. Here are the key provisions that affect product liability cases.

Damages

The first new statute changes how damages in personal injury cases, including product liability cases, are presented to the jury.

• First, parties are now able to present evidence of the amount actually paid to resolve medical bills, rather than only the amount originally billed. (In many instances, providers accept less than the full rate from insurers and even individuals.) The jury can use this information to determine the reasonable cost of any medical care.
• Second, counsel are no longer allowed to “anchor” a request for pain and suffering damages to a particular number (such as a defendant corporation’s net worth) and must wait until closing arguments to ask for a specific amount for pain and suffering.

Permitted evidence

Previously, the jury was prohibited by statute from learning if a person injured in a car wreck was not wearing a seatbelt (though there were some exceptions). The new statute allows such evidence to be admitted so jurors may consider its impact on comparative fault and injury causation. The evidence may still be excluded if the judge determines that it would unfairly prejudice the plaintiff’s case.

Trial procedures

There are three main changes to the way product liability litigation and trials are conducted.

• The new statute expressly requires that the trial in any case alleging personal injury or wrongful death be split into phases at the request of any party, with the jury first deciding whether the defendant is liable, and if it issues a verdict for the plaintiff, proceeding to a second phase to determine the amount of damages. Only evidence relevant to liability would be allowed in the first phase, so the jury will not hear details of the plaintiff’s injuries. If punitive damages are sought, those would be determined in a third phase. The court may only reject a request to split (or “bifurcate”) the trial if another party moves to oppose and either the amount sought is less than USD150,000 or the injury involves sexual assault and the judge determines forcing the plaintiff to testify twice would cause serious psychological distress – both rarely present in product liability claims. Previously, bifurcation was left to the trial court’s discretion.
• Plaintiffs will no longer be allowed to dismiss a case late in the process without consequence to refile the claim in what it believes is a more favourable jurisdiction (or to avoid a judge seen as unfavourable). Previously, a plaintiff could dismiss a case without consequence up until the time the first witness was sworn in at trial; the deadline is now 60 days after defendant files an answer.
• Any discovery and the requirement to answer a complaint are now placed on hold if a defendant files a motion to dismiss at the outset of a case, with no answer due until 15 days after the court denies the motion. Previously, a defendant had to answer even if it filed a motion to dismiss (unlike in federal court and in most states) and was required to respond to any discovery while the court was deciding the motion.

Litigation funding

The second statute, known as the Georgia Courts Access and Consumer Protection Act, requires litigation funding companies to register with the state, makes litigation funding agreements and terms discoverable, restricts funding by foreign entities, and limits the input funders can have into litigation strategy.

Statute of Repose

Georgia’s statute of repose requires most claims for injury on a product to be filed within ten years of the product’s sale. In 2025, the Georgia Supreme Court heard a case brought by a woman who claimed she developed uterine fibroids after using chemical hair relaxers over nearly two decades. The question was whether the statute barred the claim because she first started using the product more than 20 years before filing suit, or did each purchase start the clock anew? The Court concluded plaintiff’s claims could proceed because she bought at least some hair relaxers within the ten years of filing the claim, but left open the question of whether the defendant manufacturer could eventually prevail by proving the amount of hair relaxer she used within the statutory period was not sufficient, by itself, to cause her alleged injuries.

In another recent Supreme Court decision, the Court held that the exception to the statute of repose for claims involving a “disease” applies only to latent conditions that only appear many years after exposure to the product (such as mesothelioma), and not to any recurrent or chronic conditions, even if they more closely resemble a “disease” – in that case, persistent urinary tract infections.

Product Misuse

The Supreme Court also recently held that evidence that a product was misused by a third party did not bar a plaintiff from asserting a claim against the product manufacturer. The 2022 decision involved a claim against the social media app Snapchat, which included a feature that allowed users to record their speed and include it in their posts. A woman driving more than 100 mph while using the feature struck the plaintiff’s car; and when she sued Snapchat, the company countered that the intentional wrongful behaviour of the driver barred the claim. The Supreme Court, however, stated that a manufacturer has a duty to guard against reasonably foreseeable misuse of its product and allowed the claim to proceed. (The case is apparently still ongoing.) 

Statewide Settlements

In a ruling with limited application but that could guide future mass product liability settlements, the Georgia Supreme Court held that the State of Georgia’s settlement with a group of opioid manufacturers barred any state or municipal entity in Georgia from pursuing its own claim. The case arose from a certified question from the federal court handling nationwide opioid claims and involved a county hospital authority seeking to pursue its own pre-existing claims for expenses for treating opioid patients. The Georgia legislature passed an act that released any past, present, and future claims from any Georgia governmental agency, and the Supreme Court held the release could apply to claims already pending. The decision was limited to the opioid settlement, but it provides a roadmap for the state to resolve, on its own, any future claims by governmental entities, which could impact mass litigation related to numerous products.

Billion-Dollar Verdicts

Although they had little direct effect on the rules governing product liability litigation in Georgia, a discussion of recent trends would be incomplete without including three recent cases that led to the three largest trial verdicts in state history – at least before the matters were resolved by settlement. The largest was a USD2.1 billion verdict in 2025 against Bayer in favour of a Georgia homeowner who alleged the use of Roundup weedkiller caused his cancer. The award included USD65 million in compensatory damages and USD2 billion in punitive damages. The homeowner later settled with Bayer, which had purchased Roundup manufacturer Monsanto in 2018. (The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations barred some claims in a similar Missouri case.) The other two verdicts arose from crashes involving Ford trucks that led to massive initial jury verdicts. In both cases the plaintiffs alleged that the roofs of F-250 Super Duty trucks were not strong enough to withstand rollovers, crushing the occupants inside. The first case led to a USD1.7 billion verdict. The second, which involved a crash that occurred just a few days after the first verdict, resulted in a USD2.5 billion jury award in 2025. The Court of Appeals threw out the USD1.7 billion verdict in 2024 on numerous evidentiary grounds, remanding the case for a new trial. (One of the issues was whether Ford should have been allowed to offer evidence of seatbelt use, which was addressed in the new legislation.) Ford eventually settled both claims for an undisclosed amount, but proponents of the 2025 legislation used the three verdicts to argue that new laws were needed.