How did the 2024-2025 Georgia changes affect apportionment to non-parties?

· 3 min read

Georgia’s apportionment rules drew renewed attention in the 2025 legislative session, when the General Assembly passed a broad tort-reform package. The core mechanism for assigning fault to people who were not sued stayed intact, but lawmakers added a significant new rule for one category of case and changed several surrounding procedures that influence how blame gets divided.

What stayed the same

The foundation in O.C.G.A. § 51-12-33 was unchanged. A jury still fixes the damages amount and hands out percentages of fault to the parties and to any properly noticed non-parties, and a plaintiff carrying 50% or more of the blame still takes home nothing. The basic ability to point a jury toward an absent actor, supported by advance notice and evidence, remained in place going into and out of the 2025 changes.

The negligent-security rule in Senate Bill 68

Signed in April 2025, Senate Bill 68 created a focused apportionment rule for negligent-security claims, the kind of case where someone is injured by a criminal act on another’s property. In those suits the jury must apportion fault among the property owner or occupier, the person who actually committed the wrongful act, and any other responsible party. The law adds a presumption that an allocation is unreasonable if the share placed on the wrongdoers comes out lower than the combined share placed on the owners and other non-criminal parties, and it allows a court to set aside a verdict that fails to assign a reasonable degree of fault to the person who committed the crime.

Other procedural shifts that affect fault

The 2025 package touched several adjacent areas that bear on how fault and damages are decided:

  • Seatbelt evidence became admissible on issues including comparative negligence and apportionment, where it had generally been kept out before.
  • Trials can be split into separate liability and damages phases at a party’s election, so fault can be decided before any damages figure.
  • The collateral-source approach to medical bills changed, letting jurors see amounts actually accepted by providers rather than only billed amounts.

Some of these provisions apply only to cases arising after the April 2025 effective date, while others reach pending litigation, so timing matters when judging which rule governs a particular claim.

The bottom line

The 2024-2025 reforms did not abolish non-party apportionment in Georgia; they reshaped its edges. The biggest substantive shift is the negligent-security rule that pushes juries to place meaningful fault on the actual wrongdoer, while changes to seatbelt evidence, trial structure, and medical-damages proof alter the environment in which any fault allocation is made.

This article is for general educational and informational purposes only and is not legal advice. It does not create an attorney-client relationship, and Georgia law may change. For advice about a specific situation, consult a licensed Georgia personal injury attorney.

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