They just banned your best closing argument

Think about the best closing you ever gave. The one where you walked to the box and reached for a number big enough to make twelve strangers put real money on something that never came with a price tag. Not the medical bills. The number.

In Georgia, that closing is now against the rules. Reach for a figure that isn't already in the evidence and the judge has to cut you off, tell the jury to forget it, maybe blow up the trial.

Georgia did it first. Louisiana and South Carolina followed with tort packages of their own, the same coordinated push, and Missouri is debating its own right now. The lobby behind it isn't hiding the plan. Georgia is the model.

So this isn't a Georgia story. It's a preview of what's coming to your statehouse. And it does something most tort reform never bothered with. It doesn't just cap what you can win. It rewrites how you try the case.

One more preview then The Tort Report disappears.

Now the number has to live in the record

Georgia's SB 68 bans the anchor. Any damages figure you put in front of the jury that isn't tied to the evidence draws an objection, and the court has to rebuke you, tell the jury to forget it, or declare a mistrial. The number you want them to land on now has to live in the record, or it doesn't exist.

That changes the work, and it changes when you do it. The damages case gets built during discovery, not delivered at the end. Day-in-the-life proof, a vocational expert, the mental health records, medical testimony on what your client can no longer do. If it isn't in evidence before you stand up to close, it's gone.

And the medical bills won't carry it for you anymore. SB 68 lets the defense show the jury what was actually paid, not what was billed, so a number negotiated down to pennies becomes their exhibit. Stop leaning on the specials. The human harm is the whole case now, and it has to be in the record before you close.

The story gets told in two acts

Ask for it, and the court must split the trial. Fault first, in a phase where the jury never sees the X-rays, never hears about the surgeries, never learns how your client's life caved in. The human story is walled off by law until after they decide who is to blame.

So the liability phase has to move a jury on its own, with no sympathy doing the lifting. The opening carries more weight. The order of your witnesses matters in a way it didn't before. Your negligence theory has to be tight enough to win cold.

The Georgia firms gaining ground treated the day the governor signed as a hard reset. Tighter intake, experts retained earlier, venue picked before filing. The ones still waiting to see how it shakes out are the tell, because this passed once, and the people who wrote it are already running the same plays in statehouses across the country.

I wrote the full breakdown for Law.com, the version for the people it actually hits. Read it here.

One more thing.

Comedy club, house lights down, and out walks ISMO, a Finnish man with the stage presence of a substitute chemistry teacher. Calm. Polite. Looks like he is about to hand out a syllabus.

He proceeded to murder. Over the word "ass."

His thesis, delivered with the cold precision of a man who studied physics, which he did, is that "ass" is the most unstable word in the English language. A badass is good. A dumbass is bad. A smartass is a problem. A lazy ass does nothing. You can bet your ass, haul your ass, get your ass in gear, and laugh your ass off, sometimes in the same sentence. Three letters. Every meaning known to man. Including the exact opposite of itself.

I sat there in the dark thinking, I went to law school for this. I billed in six-minute increments to argue that one word has two meanings. This guy did the whole word for free and got a standing ovation.

He is, and I am not making this up, the officially crowned "Funniest Person in the World," a title he won at a Laugh Factory in 2014. I have since paid to hear that exact bit three more times. By his own definitions, that makes me the dumbass.

The clip is five minutes. Watch it, then try to read a jury instruction with a straight face.

~Adam

Quote of the week:

“This is not a threat. It is a clock.”

- Seth Price, founder of Price Benowitz and BluShark Digital, on private equity coming for the plaintiff bar. Read Seth's full breakdown.