On February 10, 2025, the following four Georgia State Senate committees met to discuss bills to potentially advance:
- Public Safety heard SB 75 and voted on SB 76, SB 102, SB 99
- Health and Human Services voted on SB 72 and SB 101
- Finance voted on SB 52 and heard SB 59
- Judiciary voted on SB 69 and SB 68
Select the associated links to read each bill in full.
Public Safety
SB 75
This bill implements standards for the signage and the use of automated safety enforcement devices. Speed zone detection in school zones would be limited to the first and last two hours of the school day. The bill will require signage to denote that you are approaching a reduced speed zone a half mile before the zone begins; additionally, a quarter mile from the start of the zone, a speed detection device must show your speed along with the upcoming speed limit. The purpose of this bill is to keep school children safe but not take advantage of drivers who may be unaware they are in a school zone.
The bill was only heard and will return to the committee at a later date.
SB 76
This bill creates a license plate that will benefit the Georgia Veterans Service Foundation. Funds raised by this license plate will be disbursed to the foundation.
The bill passed committee.
SB 99
This bill seeks to amend the Official Code of Georgia Section 16-1-3 to include the definition of a “Law enforcement officer” in relation to definitions relative to crimes and offenses. A Law enforcement officer would be defined as the following:
- A peace officer
- Any state or federal law enforcement personnel who render assistance to a law enforcement agency of this state or any political subdivision thereof in response to a declaration of a state of emergency or disaster issued by the Governor
- An appointed chief of police or department head of a law enforcement unit who has not completed the applicable training until required training is completed
- A federal law enforcement officer who is employed by the United States government as a full-time law enforcement officer, is in good standing with his or her federal agency of employment, is authorized to carry a firearm in the performance of his or her official duties, and is empowered to arrest a person for criminal violations of the United States Code
The purpose of this bill is to clarify who can assist local law enforcement or the local government in a state of emergency. This definition would provide federal officers the ability to assist in times of need.
The bill passed committee.
SB 102
This bill revises provisions relative to dogfighting, prohibits fighting of dogs and gamecocks, and prohibits possession or sale of fighting-related objects. Dog fighting was prohibited at the state level prior to this bill, but cock fighting was not.
The bill passed committee.
Health and Human Services
SB 72
The purpose of this bill is to help children with rare diseases, cancer patients , and other vulnerable patients in Georgia by giving them access to potentially life-saving treatments after they have tried all other FDA-approved options. The FDA approval process is based on an industrialized model that is meant for wide-scale manufacturing of drugs and treatments and is therefore not cost effective in the cases of rare diseases. All treatments in this legislation are provided by healthcare professionals and must be given at the recommendation of these professionals. Treatment must be provided in a facility that has received official federal-wide assurance for protection of human subjects and will follow all ethical policies for the protection of patients.
The bill passed committee.
SB 101
This bill creates a newborn screening system that requires infants to be screened for the fatal disease known as Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Testing for this disease costs $8 per child, and the false positives are less than 1%. This bill is a capital investment of $752,454 and would allow parents to implement safety protocols within days of their child’s birth rather than spending years trying to learn what the issue is.
The bill passed committee.
Finance
SB 52
This bill was discussed in an earlier committee meeting (see HERE). It suspends the severance tax on timber for the last quarter of 2024 and for all of 2025 while these counties try to harvest storm-damaged wood in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The bill aims to help the communities that were devastated by the hurricane and were declared FEMA Disaster Counties. The affected communities would be able to use this funding as soon as the Governor signs the bill into law.
The bill passed committee.
SB 59
This bill seeks to deal with the farmland conservation program and LLCs. A Senate study committee looking into preserving Georgia farmland found several situations in which farmers who were unrelated were farming together and had leased land from a third party to do so. In some cases, the third-party landowner went in breach of their covenant, and the farmers had to pay the penalty to take the burden off the landowner to continue to farm the land they had invested in for years. This bill allows farmers using an LLC who are doing everything legally can maintain rights to that land and the state will not breach that covenant.
The bill will return for a committee vote after a fiscal assessment.
Judiciary
SB 69
This bill concerns third-party litigation funding, which is essentially unregulated gambling on the judicial system. Third-party litigation financing refers to a contingency agreement between non-party financiers and a party or potential party to a lawsuit; this financing is in exchange for a property interest in the judgment of the case with an expectation of a return. There are no protections for plaintiffs who take this kind of financing; however, in every other similar financing arrangement, consumers have some sort of protection cases in Georgia. Many of these third-party financiers are foreign entities. This bill aims to combat this practice by putting regulations on this industry.
The bill passed committee.
SB 68
This bill was brought on behalf of the Governor. This bill represents an effort to balance our civil justice system, stabilize costs for healthcare providers, job creators, and Georgia consumers. Throughout the last three years, inflation has hurt families, drastically increased the cost of keeping businesses afloat, and put many healthcare providers on the road to closure. A key driver of these issues is Georgia’s legal environment, which incentivizes excess lawsuits, jackpot awards, and unfair litigation practices. The author claims this bill is not about protecting corporate profits, limiting access to the courts, or caving to the insurance companies. This bill brings eight solutions to bring balance and stability to our civil justice system.
The bill passed committee. For a full breakdown of each of the eight sections, see below.
Section 1
Section 1 deals with the problem relating to when a plaintiff brings a lawsuit and some of the damages are already quantifiable, such as bills, lost income, etc. Georgia law allows plaintiffs to recover damages for pain and suffering, emotional distress, and non-economic damages, but the law requires that non-economic damages should be awarded by an impartial jury. However, attorneys have recently aggressively been attempting to anchor the jury’s mind to irrelevant and arbitrary amounts of those damages, often contributing to excessively high verdicts.
This bill allows counsel to award non-monetary damages during the closing arguments after the jury has seen all the evidence as long as the monetary worth is rationally related to the evidence admitted in court. Attorneys may request the jury to return a specific dollar amount for non-economic damages as long as that amount does not refer to arbitrary or unsubstantiated anchors.
Section 2
This section concerns when an answer is due after a motion to dismiss is filed in temporary stay of discovery. In a typical process, the plaintiff’s counsel must file a complaint with the clerk of the court, and the defendant must file an answer to the court within 30 days. One of their answers may be a motion to dismiss. Under the current rules, if the defendant files a motion to dismiss because the lawsuit is baseless, they still have to prepare and file an answer with the court and potentially engage in an extensive discovery request before the court rules on the motion to dismiss.
This section allows a defendant to file a motion to dismiss in lieu of an answer and encourages a judge to rule on the motion to dismiss before the discovery responses are due. This saves the court, the plaintiff, and the defendant time and resources in a case that will be imminently dismissed and will prevent frivolous cases from racking up unnecessary legal fees.
This will also require plaintiffs to file a with a more definitive statement, one in which the allegations are not vague. The defendant must be given a statement that clearly explains what they have been accused of doing.
Section 3
Currently, only plaintiffs have the right to dismiss their case without prejudice all the way up to and including the time after the jury is selected and the parties have actually given their open statements. This rule gives the plaintiffs an unfair ability to refile or cherry pick a more favorable jurisdiction to them after the defense and defendant have paid the cost of preparing for and beginning the trial of their case.
SB 68 aims to adopt the standard followed by federal rules of civil procedure for voluntary dismissals without prejudice (cases dismissed this way may be refiled). SB 68 will allow plaintiffs to dismiss their case without prejudice up until the responsive pleadings have been filed plus 60 days.
Section 4
This section deals with the issue of getting double recovery for attorney’s fees. The general rule is that everyone pays for their own attorneys, but we have multiple statutory provisions that can shift fee burdens to the other party based on certain conduct. In Georgia, some attorneys have used multiple statutes to make claims for multiple recoveries of the same attorney’s fees. This drives up the cost that everyone is paying. This section clarifies that this is not allowed and that attorney’s fees must be based on one rule, must be necessary, and can be recovered only one time if the statute allows.
Section 5
A law currently in Georgia code states that non-seatbelt use of someone involved in a car wreck is inadmissible in the evidence even though Georgia law requires seatbelt use. This section aims to make this information admissible as evidence.
Section 6
This section deals with negligent security claims, such as whether someone should be legally responsible for the criminal acts of third parties committing felonies on someone else’s property. For instance, a Racetrack in Downtown Atlanta was held liable for shootings in their parking lot despite their security officers, security systems, and cameras. This causes property insurance costs to skyrocket.
This section details when a negligent security claim can be brought, which is missing in the current code. It offers differing standards for an invitee, a licensee, and a trespasser. This section also clearly carves out a clause for human trafficking victims to bring a case against a property owner if the owner willfully ignored what was going on.
Section 6 also holds security contractors of a property owner to the same standard as the property owner.
Section 7
This deals with phantom damages or inflated invoices, which significantly increases litigation costs in Georgia. Hospital billing practices are governed by federal law; as such, the Georgia General Assembly cannot address these. However, this section deals with the special damages brought to the jury, specifically medical damages. This section dictates that the plaintiff can only request the amount they were obligated to pay rather than the full amount covered by insurance.
Section 8
This deals with bifurcation in a case, which is dividing the presentation of evidence into two phases. In the current process, liability and damages are combined into one phase so that the jury hears all about it simultaneously. This presents a risk that, in case of catastrophic or sympathetic injuries, the jury may award damages even in the absence of liability. This section bifurcates those two issues, allowing the jury to hear the case to determine whether the defendant is liable and then move forward with damages if the defendant is found liable.
