I have spent my career representing people who have been hurt through no fault of their own — people who were doing everything right when a distracted driver, a reckless trucker, or a negligent motorist turned their lives upside down. I know what it takes to fight for a real person against well-funded insurance companies and their armies of defense attorneys. And I can tell you, without hesitation, that Governor Kathy Hochul's auto tort reform proposals — buried inside her FY 2027 Executive Budget — are among the most dangerous attacks on the rights of ordinary New Yorkers that I have seen in my years of practice at Georgaklis & Mallas PLLC.
The Governor calls this an "affordability" initiative. She says she is fighting fraud. She is doing neither. What she is actually doing is systematically dismantling the legal protections that innocent crash victims depend on — and she is doing it on behalf of the insurance industry, which stands to pocket billions while injured New Yorkers are left holding the bill.
I want to walk you through four specific proposals, ranked in order of how devastating I believe they will be. Each one is wrong. Together, they are a catastrophe.
Joint and Several Liability: Why Should the Innocent Victim Pay the Price?
This is, in my view, the single most unjust proposal in the entire package — and it is the one I want you to understand most clearly, because it strikes at something fundamental: the idea that innocent people should not be made to suffer for wrongs they did not commit.
Under current New York law, auto accident cases carry joint and several liability. That means if multiple defendants contributed to causing a crash, each of them can be held responsible for the full amount of the injured victim's damages. A single deep-pocketed defendant — frequently a taxi or for-hire vehicle company, a municipality, or a public authority — can be held liable for the entirety of the plaintiff's damages even if another defendant cannot pay.
