Marathon Strategies founder Phil Singer said the impact of recent legal-system changes in Louisiana will take years to determine.
Louisiana in 2025 had the seventh largest payout of “nuclear verdicts” – jury awards of at least $10 million – among the 50 states, reflecting a ballooning number of such verdicts nationwide in recent years, a new study says.
Marathon Strategies, a communications and research firm, recently released a study called Corporate Verdicts Go Thermonuclear, 2026 Edition, which reported that the sum of Louisiana’s six nuclear verdicts last year reached $1.27 billion. In contrast, the No. 1 state on the Marathon Strategies list was Georgia, with a nuclear verdict total of $4.87 billion in 2025.
In response to the 40.7% increase in nuclear verdicts nationwide between 2024 and last year, eight states enacted legal reforms, including disclosure rules governing third-party litigation financing, caps on certain categories of damages and limits on attorney fees. Louisiana was among the states approving tort reforms, but the state’s reform efforts have been a mixed bag, according to reform advocates.
Last year, Gov. Jeff Landry signed legislation that removed the presumption that an injury was the result of the act alleged in a legal claim, limited damages for injured parties who lacked insurance in auto insurance claims and provided insurance discounts for commercial vehicle owners who install dash cams and other data-recording devices.
But the report also points out that Landry in 2024 vetoed a key legal reform. He rejected a bill that would have limited the money plaintiffs can collect for injuries to the amount they were paid by Medicaid or a private insurer. And Landry also signed a bill that extended the statute of limitations on torts from one year to two.
Phil Singer, the founder and CEO of Marathon Strategies, said it’s too early to determine the impact of Landry’s pro-plaintiff actions on the rising number of nuclear verdicts.
“Civil litigation can take years to reach a jury: Some of Louisiana's largest recent verdicts were issued in lawsuits filed long before Landry took office,” Singer told the Louisiana Record in an email. “The $745 million Chevron verdict last year, for example, came from litigation originally filed in 2013. And Louisiana changed its medical-expense rules again in 2025, with new reforms taking effect this year.”
In turn, the effects of extending the statute-of-limitations window will have to be examined in future years rather than looking at cases already on the books, according to Singer.
In addition, it’s unclear whether the $745 million verdict against Chevron for coastal erosion damage in Plaquemines Parish in past decades will stand after the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case should have been evaluated in federal rather than state court.
Nationwide, the study concluded that the vast number of nuclear verdicts resulted from product-liability lawsuits and that $10 million-plus verdicts span the spectrum of economic sectors. The surge in such cases has multiple causes, including a demographic influx of millennial and Generation X jurors who are more suspicious of corporate actions, the growth of attorney advertising and new liability theories involving such areas as artificial intelligence, climate issues and “forever chemicals,” according to the report.
Notable nuclear verdicts in 2025 include the first such eight-figure payout to a marijuana company and an antitrust case brought by basketball veteran Michael Jordan against NASCAR.
“After another historic year, verdicts appear poised to continue rising in 2026,” the report says. “Surveys of corporate counsels indicate that reaching pre-trial settlements has become more difficult due to increasing legal costs, regulatory changes and high settlement demands.”
