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.

Governor Hochul proposes to change this so that defendants who are less than 50% at fault would only be responsible for damages proportional to their share of fault.

Let me explain, in plain English, why this is profoundly unfair.

When I take a case involving multiple defendants — say, a distracted driver and a negligently maintained commercial vehicle — my client, the crash victim, did nothing wrong. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time because of someone else's bad choices. The tortfeasors — the wrongdoers — created the situation. They are the ones who acted negligently. My client was just living their life.

Now suppose one of those defendants is a large corporation with deep pockets, found to be 49% at fault, and the other defendant is an individual driver with minimal assets and a bare-minimum insurance policy, found to be 51% at fault. Under Hochul's proposal, the corporation — which nearly half-caused my client's catastrophic injuries — walks away paying only 49 cents on every dollar of damages. If the other defendant can't satisfy the rest of the judgment, my client absorbs that loss.

Ask yourself: is that fair? Why should the burden of an insolvent defendant fall on the innocent victim rather than on the wrongdoer? The injured party didn't cause this. The tortfeasors did. Every tortfeasor — even the one who is 10% at fault, even the one who is 1% at fault — made a choice that contributed to the harm. My client made no such choice. Under any reasonable conception of justice, the party who did something wrong should bear the consequences of that wrongdoing — not the party who did nothing wrong at all.

The burden of an uncompensated loss should never fall on an innocent victim. It should fall on those who created the harm. That is what joint and several liability guarantees. It is not a technicality. It is a moral commitment embedded in our law that says: if you participate in causing someone's injury, you are responsible for making that person whole — and you cannot escape that responsibility simply because your co-defendant ran out of money.

Joint and several liability exists for a very good reason: the wrongdoers, not the victims, should bear the risk that one defendant can't pay. This proposal shifts that risk entirely onto the injured party.

And there is a broader public cost to this proposal that the Governor has conveniently ignored. When a crash victim can no longer recover their full damages because one tortfeasor is judgment-proof and another has been let off the hook by this proposal, that victim still needs medical care. They still need surgery, rehabilitation, home health aides, and long-term support. Who pays? Medicaid. Social Security Disability. Public programs funded by you, the taxpayer.

This proposal doesn't save money. It transfers costs from the negligent party's insurer — where they belong — to the public fisc. The insurance companies save. The state spends more on public assistance programs. And the injured victim gets less. That is not reform. That is a scheme that shifts the financial consequences of negligence from those who caused harm to those who suffered it — and to every New York taxpayer who funds the safety net programs that will be forced to fill the gap.

Comparative Fault: An Asymmetric Rule That Only Benefits Insurance Companies

New York currently follows a pure comparative fault system, and it is one of the fairest approaches to tort law in the nation. Here is how it works, and here is why the Governor's proposed change is a fraud on the people of this state.

Under the current system, if a jury finds that my client was 30% at fault in a crash and the defendant was 70% at fault, my client's recovery is reduced by 30%. They receive 70 cents on the dollar. That is fair. My client's own contribution to the accident is already being held against them — their recovery is already reduced proportionally. The system acknowledges shared fault and prices it accordingly.

Now look at what Hochul proposes to do on the defendant's side of the ledger. If a jury determines that a victim is 51% responsible for an automobile crash, the victim would be prohibited from recovering pain and suffering damages, even if they otherwise sustained a serious injury.

Do you see the asymmetry? Here is what this looks like in practice. If my client is found to be 40% at fault, their recovery is reduced by 40%. Their fault has consequences — always. But if a defendant is found to be 49% at fault — nearly half responsible for causing a crash — that defendant pays nothing for non-economic damages under this proposal. A driver who is 49% responsible for shattering someone's spine walks away without paying a single dollar toward that person's pain and suffering.

The plaintiff is penalized for every percentage point of fault assigned to them. The defendant escapes all consequence so long as their fault lands below 50%. It is a rigged system dressed up as reform — one in which injured people always lose something and negligent defendants can walk away with nothing owed.

And let me address the Governor's central claim directly: that this will save New Yorkers money on their auto insurance premiums. I have been doing this long enough to know that when insurance companies are handed a windfall by the legislature, they do not pass it on to consumers. They keep it. The support for these proposals is coming from corporate interests, rideshare companies, and insurance industry stakeholders. These are not the stakeholders who care about your premium. These are the stakeholders who care about their profit margins.

The modified comparative fault rule does not reduce fraud. Fraudsters don't worry about comparative fault — they fabricate facts entirely. What this rule does is eliminate the legitimate claims of real people who were partially, but not primarily, at fault for a crash. A pedestrian who crossed against a light and was hit by a speeding driver. A cyclist who was slightly out of the lane and was sideswiped by a texting motorist. These are real people with real injuries who already pay for their contribution through a reduced recovery. Under Hochul's law, they may receive nothing. And the driver who was 49% responsible for destroying their quality of life pays nothing either.

This does not save New Yorkers money on their auto policies. This lines the pockets of the insurance industry. Period.

The 90/180 Threshold: Slamming the Courthouse Door on Working People

Under New York's no-fault insurance law, a crash victim can pursue a pain and suffering claim for a "medically determined injury or impairment of a non-permanent nature" if it prevents them from performing substantially all of their usual daily activities for at least 90 out of the first 180 days following the accident. This is known as the 90/180 standard, and it has been a lifeline for working New Yorkers for decades.

Governor Hochul proposes removing this language from Insurance Law §5102(d), the section that defines what constitutes a "serious injury" under New York auto accident law. Eliminating this standard means that even if an injured victim is unable to work, perform household duties, or care for their family during the first three months following a car accident, they may no longer qualify for non-economic damages.

In my practice, I have represented many clients who fit precisely this profile. They are construction workers, home health aides, delivery drivers — people whose bodies are their livelihood. They sustain a herniated disc, a torn rotator cuff, a serious soft tissue injury. The injury is real and documented. Their pain is real. Their inability to work is real. But because the injury may not be classified as "permanent" on an MRI, they rely on the 90/180 standard to have their day in court.

The Governor frames this as eliminating "vague" and "subjective" standards that invite fraud. But in my experience, it is the insurance industry — not injured claimants — that plays games with threshold standards. Insurers have spent years using so-called independent medical examiners to minimize, dispute, and deny legitimate injuries. The 90/180 threshold is not a loophole for fraudsters. It is a doorway to justice for real people with real injuries whose lives were genuinely disrupted by someone else's negligence.

Eliminating it will not stop frivolous lawsuits. It will just slam the courthouse door on injured crash victims whose lives are turned upside down by traffic violence — the very people our tort system was designed to protect.

Caps on Damages for Uninsured Motorists: Punishing the Completely Innocent

The fourth proposal caps non-economic damages for uninsured motorists and individuals engaged in unlawful conduct at the time of a crash. On its surface, this sounds like common sense. But as a plaintiff's lawyer, I want to give you a concrete example of exactly who this proposal will actually hurt — because it is not who the Governor is describing.

Governor Hochul proposes to cap the payout on non-economic damages — pain and suffering — for drivers operating an uninsured vehicle at the time of a crash. And here is the real-world scenario that illustrates precisely why this is so unjust.

Not because you did anything wrong. Not because you caused the crash. Not because you committed fraud. Solely because the car you borrowed — without your knowledge, without any way for you to have known — happened to be uninsured. You had absolutely no control over that fact. You were already a victim of someone else's negligence before the truck ever hit you.

The 18-wheel truck driver who destroyed your life? His insurer's exposure to your non-economic damages is capped at $100,000. A century in a wheelchair. A lifetime of indignity and loss. One hundred thousand dollars.

This is arbitrary. It is cruel. And it has absolutely nothing to do with fighting insurance fraud. It punishes innocent borrowers, good Samaritans, and people who had no knowledge of and no control over the insurance status of a vehicle they were asked to use.

If the Governor wants to cap damages for people who knowingly and intentionally break the law, that is a conversation worth having. But a proposal written broadly enough to ensnare an innocent person who borrowed their neighbor's car — and cap their recovery for a catastrophic, life-altering injury at $100,000 — is not careful legislation. It is a blunt instrument that will devastate the most sympathetic victims in our court system.