Patrick Cleary, Courtney Shytle and Samuel Boyd recently published the article, "South Carolina's 2025 Tort and Liquor Liability Reform Bill - Virtue Tempered by Cloudiness" in the ACC South Carolina Focus newsletter.
You’re approaching the end of 2025. With the most recent legal department reorganization, you’re now responsible for all litigation in the Carolinas. You’ve got a wide panoply of cases – on a typical day you have some employment matters, commercial litigation, insurance coverage disputes, premises liability, products liability, company owned vehicle crash cases and toxic tort cases. You’ve got several tort cases with multiple defendants.
In projecting your exposure in 2026 and whether you want your outside counsel to push some of these cases to trial, you recall that settled parties and non-parties have not been permitted to be on the verdict form in South Carolina. But you also recall seeing news articles about South Carolina’s tort and liquor liability reform bill, H. 3430, passing this summer. You turn to the new statute for some guidance and see that joint and several liability has been adjusted and that non-parties and settled parties can now appear on the verdict form. You think this is a reasonable and appropriate change, and one that will be significant for how you evaluate your defense strategy in 2026.
And make no mistake, a tort reform bill of this magnitude in South Carolina is significant. But upon closer inspection, the General Assembly carved out deep exceptions into its rules about non-party inclusion. The interplay of endless combinations of claims, parties, and non-parties will likely instigate further motions practice through courtrooms statewide as litigants, their counsel, and courts attempt to extract clarity from this new scheme.
This article highlights these changes and areas of ambiguity that must be resolved before litigants can accurately predict who will appear on the verdict form. The most sweeping reform touches the core of how fault and financial responsibility is allocated among defendants, but the bill simultaneously adjusts who can be identified for a jury’s consideration of fault at trial. But such reforms are not immediate.
Continue reading the article here.