Governor Named ‘Tort Reform Trailblazer’
By Hank Russell
A tort reform organization recently released a report showing that New York is one of four states whose lawmakers are in “legislative limbo” as Governor Kathy Hochul has signed a pair of lawsuit reform bills into law while the state Legislature continues to support the trial lawyers.
The American Tort Reform Association’s (ATRA) 2026 Legislative HeatCheck report said the state has moved up from the “judicial inferno” last year. ATRA places states in that area when the lawmakers do the bidding of the personal injury lawyer lobby, thereby expanding liability risks. The New York Legislature joins California, Michigan and Ohio in “Legislative Limbo,” a category ATRA renamed this year from “Heat Watch,” in the 2026 Legislative HeatCheck report.
ATRA cited Governor Kathy Hochul’s signing of what they call the state’s most significant lawsuit reforms in more than 20 years, as lawmakers kept pushing liability-expanding bills in Albany. The group also designated Hochul as a “tort reform trailblazer.”
On May 27, Hochul secured a package of auto liability and anti-fraud reforms. The new law moves New York from pure to modified comparative fault in motor vehicle claims, tightens the legal definition of a “serious injury” that lets a driver sue beyond no-fault benefits, and limits noneconomic damages to cases involving serious injuries.
It also caps noneconomic damages at $100,000 for drivers who were driving drunk, fleeing a felony or driving uninsured at the time of a crash. On the fraud side, it makes it a crime to hire, recruit or orchestrate someone else into staging a car accident, and bars health care providers with a history of misconduct from treating workers’ compensation patients or performing independent medical exams.
“Governor Hochul delivered real, measurable progress for New Yorkers this year, and that deserves credit,” said Lauren Sheets Jarrell, ATRA’s vice president and counsel for civil justice policy. “Over the objections of a reluctant legislature in ‘limbo,’ Governor Hochul showed up as a ‘Tort Reform Trailblazer.’”
Tom Stebbins, Executive Director of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York said, “By pushing back against Albany’s most powerful special interest and delivering historic liability reforms, Governor Hochul has shown what true leadership — and what a real affordability agenda — looks like.”
Stebbins urged the state Legislature to “follow her lead” and update “New York’s outdated, lawsuit-friendly laws instead of protecting the billboard lawyers’ business model. New York will never be affordable for working families as long as it remains a Judicial Hellhole, and a haven for fraudsters and profiteering attorneys.”
According to ATRA, New York drivers pay about $4,000 a year on average for auto insurance, nearly $1,500 above the national average, and the state had the nation’s second-highest number of staged car crashes in 2023, with 1,729 reported.
A recent report from the Empire Center for Public Policy outlines how Albany can build on Hochul’s reforms by bringing New York’s liability laws in line with the rest of the country. It also notes that the Legislature is contemplating enacting laws that the think tank says will move the Empire State further in the wrong direction, including a bill that the report refers to as the Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Wish List.
ATRA also named New York City the No. 2 “judicial hellhole” behind Los Angeles as the city’s judicial system rewrote the laws on attorney advertising. New York’s Office of Court Administration implemented what ATRA calls the most significant deregulation of attorney advertising and solicitation rules in decades, repealing and replacing the state’s Rules of Professional Conduct governing attorney advertising and solicitation.
In 2025 alone, according to ATRA, plaintiffs’ attorneys poured nearly $179 million into almost 1.2 million local legal service ads across New York’s media markets, which is up 84% since 2023. Seventy-eight percent of those ads explicitly promoted personal injury and accident attorneys.
Sheets Jarell said passing reforms in one state budget alone isn’t enough. “Lawmakers are still sitting on bills that would pile even more lawsuits onto a system that’s already failing families,” she said. “New Yorkers are still paying the price for years of lawsuit abuse. … They can’t let one budget deal become an excuse to expand liability everywhere else.”