Hochul's 2026 Tort Reform Push: How the 50% Bar and Joint-and-Several Liability Changes Would Reshape Your New York Car Accident Case

Last reviewed: April 30, 2026 — Active legislative session. We will update this analysis as the budget bill text changes.

Governor Kathy Hochul is pressing forward with the most consequential tort-reform package New York has seen in decades. Two distinct proposals are tied to the 2026-2027 budget standoff in Albany — and either, if enacted, would fundamentally change how a Long Island car accident case is built, valued, and settled. The first proposal would replace New York’s century-old “pure” comparative negligence rule with a 50% bar (a “modified” comparative negligence system used in roughly 35 states). The second — and in my practice the more important one — would reform joint-and-several liability, limiting deep-pocket defendants who are less than 50% at fault to paying only their proportional share of damages.

I represent both injured plaintiffs and insurance defendants in New York courts every week. I see these reforms from both angles. This guide is the analytical, practitioner-level read I would give a client asking what is actually changing, what isn’t, and what to do about it.

“It affects us on both sides of the business. That’s what’s beautiful about it. It makes defense cases more defensible. It makes plaintiff cases more difficult.”

— Jason Tenenbaum, on the dual-sided practitioner view of the reform package

What’s Actually on the Table

To understand the reform, you have to understand exactly what New York looks like today.

Today: pure comparative negligence (CPLR §1411)

CPLR §1411 is the cornerstone. It says that an injured plaintiff’s recovery is reduced by their percentage of fault — but never barred. Even if a New York jury finds you were 99% at fault for a crash, you can still recover 1% of your damages from a defendant who was 1% at fault. This is what “pure” comparative negligence means. The arithmetic is brutal at high-fault percentages, but the courthouse door stays open.

If you are reading this trying to figure out whether you have a case despite being partly responsible, our standalone explainer on partial fault in New York car accidents walks through how the math works under the current rule. Most of what’s there will still be useful even if reform passes — but the percentage-cutoff piece would change.

Today: joint and several liability with statutory limits (CPLR §1601)

CPLR §1601 tells the second half of the story. Under traditional joint-and-several liability, any defendant whose negligence contributes to a plaintiff’s indivisible injury is liable for the entire judgment — even if the defendant was only 1% at fault. The plaintiff can collect the full amount from any defendant and let the defendants sort out contribution among themselves. New York’s §1601 already limits joint and several to economic damages above 50% of fault for non-economic damages, with a list of exceptions for products liability, motor-vehicle defendants where the plaintiff didn’t contribute to the accident, and several other categories. Net effect: in most New York car accident cases involving an innocent plaintiff (a passenger, a pedestrian, the non-tailgating driver in a rear-end crash), joint-and-several still operates close to the traditional rule.

Proposed: a 50% bar in CPLR §1411

The first reform proposal would amend CPLR §1411 to bar recovery entirely if the plaintiff is more than 50% at fault. Some proposed drafts use a 51% threshold; others use 50%. The practical effect of either is the same: at the threshold of “the plaintiff is more responsible than the defendant,” recovery is gone. Florida amended its statute this way in March 2023 (HB 837), and New Jersey has long operated under a similar rule. Roughly 35 states are now in this camp.

Proposed: joint-and-several reform

The second reform would extend §1601’s existing limits and curb joint-and-several liability further — most importantly, by limiting deep-pocket defendants who are less than 50% at fault to paying only their proportional share of all damages, including economic. Florida’s 2023 reform package included a parallel adjustment. The political logic is that ride-share companies, trucking companies, and municipalities — all of whom carry large insurance towers — should not effectively underwrite the entire judgment when their causal contribution is small.

These two reforms are conceptually different. They will have different effects. Reading them as a single “Hochul tort reform” is a mistake.

What the 50% Bar Actually Changes for Plaintiffs

The 50% bar is genuinely a regime change, but its real-world impact is narrower than the political rhetoric suggests. In my practice, here’s what would actually shift:

“The cases you should never take now? You never will take them. That’s what the 50% bar actually means in day-to-day practice.”

— Jason Tenenbaum

The cases that go away

There are categories of car accident claims that I take today knowing the liability split is going to be 50/50, 55/45, or even 60/40, where the plaintiff will recover something but the percentage will be ugly. Under a 50% bar, those cases stop being viable for the plaintiff:

• Sideswipe collisions where both vehicles were changing lanes. Without dashcam footage or a clear non-self-serving witness, these often resolve at 50/50 — recoverable today, barred under reform if the plaintiff drifts 1% over.
• Sudden-stop / rear-end cases where the rear vehicle has a sudden-stop or brake-checking defense. Pure rear-end cases stay viable. The marginal cases — where the trailing driver argues the front driver brake-checked or stopped without cause — frequently end up in the 45/55 zone.
• Lane-change disputes. Two drivers entering the same lane at the same moment, neither with clean witness testimony, frequently shake out 50/50 in arbitration or summary judgment.
• Some intersection collisions with mutual right-of-way disputes (yellow-light gambles, ambiguous stop-sign sequencing).

“If there’s a rear-end collision and you represent the rear-render, you’re probably never going to take that case. Even if you can show a sudden stop, your odds of getting more than 50% on the other party are slim. Sideswipes — same thing. You probably don’t want to take a sideswipe anymore. You’d need photographic evidence, not just he-said-she-said.”

— Jason Tenenbaum, on which case types come off the plaintiff intake list

I will not stop taking the rear-end case where the trailing driver had time to stop. I will not stop taking the left-turn-into-oncoming-traffic case where my client was lawfully proceeding. Those are still 80/20 or 90/10 cases, and they remain firmly recoverable. What I will stop taking is the marginal case — and that is, in fairness to the reform’s proponents, one of the points.

The settlement leverage shift

What plaintiff’s lawyers don’t always say out loud: the 50% bar gives defendants leverage to offer less in settlement, because the defendant can point to the cliff. Pre-reform, a defendant facing a likely 60/40 plaintiff verdict would settle reasonably because they were going to pay something. Post-reform, the same defendant can credibly threaten to take the case to verdict and roll the dice on the 50% line. That changes how cases are valued at the table.

That said: insurance carriers also know that a jury occasionally surprises everyone. A defendant who sincerely thinks the case is 51% on the plaintiff might still settle rather than risk a 49% jury determination that delivers a full verdict. The leverage shift is real, but it’s not absolute.

Why cameras may moot most of this in five years

The single biggest factor underwriting the 50% bar’s plaintiff impact is evidentiary uncertainty. Sideswipes and lane-change cases settle 50/50 because nobody can prove what actually happened. That’s already changing rapidly.

A current Tesla has eight cameras that record continuously. A modern dashcam is $80. Every passenger commercial vehicle (Uber, Lyft, MTA bus, school bus, FedEx truck, Amazon delivery van) has at least one forward-facing camera, and most have multiple. Major intersections in Nassau and Suffolk County are being instrumented with municipal traffic cameras. Companies like Nexar sell aggregated dashcam footage from their fleet of cars to litigants.

Once the typical car accident has video coverage, the 50% bar becomes much less consequential — because nobody is settling 50/50 anymore. Liability is what the video shows. The reform is real today; in five to ten years, evidence technology may be eating most of its bite.

“As more cars have cameras on them, this whole 50% bar lessens in importance. Once that evidence comes out, it’s indisputable. Tesla’s already got eight cameras on every car. They could pass a law tomorrow saying you can’t drive without a camera.”

— Jason Tenenbaum, on why the 50% bar may quietly self-resolve over the next decade

The Joint-and-Several Reform Is the Bigger Deal

This is the part of the reform package that gets less press attention but does more damage to seriously injured plaintiffs. Here’s the scenario I see in practice that the reform would change:

“The 50% bar gets the headlines. But the joint-and-several liability reform is the bigger change. That’s the one that really gets my attention. The innocent passenger has never done anything wrong — he’s just sitting in the back seat minding his own business. That’s the case that gets hurt the most.”

— Jason Tenenbaum, on why the less-discussed half of the reform package matters more

The innocent passenger problem

Imagine a Long Island passenger in an Uber or Lyft. The rideshare driver picks her up, drops off another passenger, and pulls away from a stop sign. The driver glances both ways, edges out — and gets T-boned by a driver in the cross street running a stop sign. Liability is split: the cross-traffic driver is, say, 90% at fault for running the stop sign; the rideshare driver is 10% at fault for not seeing the oncoming car.

Under the law as it stands today, my passenger client — who did absolutely nothing wrong, who was reading her phone in the back seat — can collect the full judgment from either defendant under joint-and-several principles. If the cross-traffic driver carries the New York minimum 25/50 liability policy, the passenger collects $25,000 from him. The remaining $775,000 of an $800,000 verdict comes from the rideshare driver’s commercial policy, which under TLC and rideshare regulations carries $1.25 million per occurrence in New York.

Under the proposed reform, if the rideshare driver is found 10% at fault, the passenger collects $25,000 from the cross-traffic defendant — and only $80,000 (10% of $800,000) from the rideshare driver. Total recovery: $105,000 against $800,000 in damages. The rest is uncollectable. The passenger goes home with 13 cents on the dollar even though she was 0% at fault.

“Right now, if my Uber driver is 1% at fault, he’s paying the entire verdict — all of the damages the plaintiff has endured. Under the reform, the Uber would only pay its proportional share, as long as it’s less than 50% at fault.”

— Jason Tenenbaum, on the rideshare innocent-passenger scenario the reform fundamentally changes

That is the change to worry about. The 50% bar primarily affects cases I would settle for less. The joint-and-several reform affects cases involving catastrophic injuries to people who did nothing wrong.

The defense view of the same change is — fairly — the mirror image:

“From my vantage point — representing Uber, representing these commercial defendants with the larger policies — if my guy’s only 10% at fault, I’ll take that verdict. 10% of $800,000 is $80,000. Because I’m less than 50%, I only pay my proportional share. From the reform I’m seeing, that’s the more influential half.”

— Jason Tenenbaum, on why insurance defense is the side this reform actually rewards

Where this matters most

The cases where joint-and-several reform creates the largest practical injury to plaintiffs are predictable:

• Innocent passenger cases where the primary at-fault driver carries minimum coverage and a secondary at-fault driver is the deep pocket (rideshare, MTA, school bus, commercial vehicle, employer-owned vehicle).
• Pedestrian cases where the at-fault driver was uninsured or carrying minimum coverage, but a co-defendant — a municipality with a defective traffic signal, a bar that over-served the driver, a vehicle owner whose negligent maintenance contributed — has real coverage.
• Multi-vehicle truck cases where a truck (5-10 million in coverage) is 30% at fault and a passenger-vehicle driver (25k policy) is 70% at fault. Today: the plaintiff collects against the truck’s full tower. Under reform: 30% of damages from the truck, 25k from the car driver, the rest written off.

Where the reform doesn’t change the math much

• Single-defendant cases. No joint-and-several issue — the defendant’s percentage of fault doesn’t matter for collection because there’s only one source of recovery.
• Cases where every defendant has substantial coverage. Two trucks colliding with a passenger inside one of them. Both have $5M policies. Whether the plaintiff collects 100% from one or splits proportionally between them doesn’t materially change the recovery.
• Cases where the at-fault breakdown puts a deep pocket above 50%. Joint-and-several reform typically only kicks in below 50%. A 51% at-fault rideshare driver still pays the full freight under most reform drafts.

How Florida’s 2023 Reform Played Out — A Useful Comparison

Florida is the closest jurisdiction with a fresh tort-reform regime. In March 2023 the Florida legislature passed HB 837 in a near-overnight session. The bill moved Florida from pure comparative negligence to a 50% bar, shortened the negligence statute of limitations from four years to two, modified bad-faith insurance claim procedures, and adjusted joint-and-several treatment.

What practitioners report from Florida three years in:

• Plaintiff filings dropped significantly in the months immediately after passage, then partially recovered as plaintiffs’ counsel adjusted case-selection criteria.
• Sideswipe and disputed-fault cases largely disappeared from active dockets. Marginal cases stopped being economically viable.
• Settlement values declined in the 30-65% fault range as defense counsel leveraged the cliff.
• Catastrophic-injury cases involving multi-defendant fault splits saw real reductions in recoverable damages, exactly as expected under joint-and-several reform.
• Insurance premiums did not meaningfully decline, despite that being a centerpiece of the reform’s political case.

If New York follows the Florida pattern, the same dynamics will apply here. Long Island’s litigation environment isn’t identical to South Florida — among other things, our jury pools are different, our no-fault system overlays the negligence regime in motor vehicle cases, and the serious injury threshold under Insurance Law §5102(d) already filters cases at the front end. But the broad direction of the reform’s effects will be similar.

What This Means for Your Active or Pending Case

A few practical points for people who are already in a New York car accident case or thinking about one:

If your case is pending today, you are governed by today’s law

Pending cases under any reform package would be evaluated under the law in effect at the time of the accident, not the law in effect at the time of trial. If your accident occurred under pure comparative negligence and full joint-and-several, you keep those rules. The reform applies prospectively to accidents occurring after the effective date.

If you are in an accident now, document everything aggressively

Independent of reform, the value of documentary evidence in any disputed-fault case has never been higher. If you are in any sort of crash on Long Island today:

• Photograph the scene before vehicles are moved if it is safe to do so. Photograph the resting positions, the damage patterns, the road conditions, the traffic signals, the skid marks.
• Get witness contact information. Independent witnesses have outsized value in disputed-fault cases.
• Preserve dashcam footage immediately — most dashcams overwrite within hours or days.
• Call your attorney before talking to the other side’s adjuster. A recorded statement that includes a stray “I think I might have been a little late on the brakes” is exactly the kind of thing a defense attorney builds a comparative-fault case around.

Our Long Island car accident lawyer guide covers the disputed-fault scenarios in detail, and our standalone analysis of what to do when fault is disputed walks through evidence strategy step by step.

If the reform passes, case selection becomes more disciplined

For prospective plaintiffs reading this: if you are concerned a partial-fault situation may make your case harder under reform, the answer is the same as it has always been. Talk to a lawyer. The cases that survive the 50% bar are the ones with strong evidence supporting your version of events. Building that evidence record starts at the scene.

What’s Next: Scaffold Law Reform

If the comparative-negligence and joint-and-several reforms pass, the political momentum will almost certainly shift to Labor Law §240 — the Scaffold Law. The Scaffold Law’s strict-liability framework for gravity-related construction injuries has been the white whale of New York tort-reform advocates for decades. The argument that absolute liability inflates construction costs by hundreds of millions per year has been made every legislative session and beaten back every time.

This is a topic where I differ from much of the plaintiff’s bar. I do represent injured construction workers and I understand the worker-safety logic of strict liability. But the Scaffold Law as written — full strict liability with the only available defense being sole proximate cause — is in tension with the way the rest of the negligence system operates. If New York moves to a 50% bar in CPLR §1411, the inconsistency between negligence law for car accidents and absolute liability for ladder falls becomes starker. Reform of §240 is the logical next agenda item, and I expect it to be the next significant tort-reform fight.

“Once they pass this, scaffold-law reform is going to be next. This is just the beginning. I am all for it. Construction projects in New York are outrageously expensive. People should not be paid for improperly climbing a ladder.”

— Jason Tenenbaum, on why the comparative-negligence reform is a leading indicator for §240 reform

The Bottom Line

The Hochul tort-reform package is a real change, but the parts that get the headlines (the 50% bar) are not the parts that will actually do the most damage to seriously injured New Yorkers. The joint-and-several reform — which gets less attention — is what will hurt innocent passengers, pedestrians, and catastrophically injured plaintiffs whose recovery depends on a deep-pocket defendant carrying real coverage. The 50% bar will primarily reshape case selection at the margin and is partially being moot-ed by the camera-everywhere future.

If reform passes, your evidence becomes the case. If you are in a Long Island car accident before reform passes, you are governed by today’s pure comparative negligence and current joint-and-several rules. Either way, document everything, talk to counsel before talking to insurers, and don’t assume partial fault means no case.

For a free, confidential consultation about your Long Island car accident case, call (516) 750-0595 or contact the firm. Our Long Island personal injury practice handles motor-vehicle, premises, construction, and catastrophic-injury cases across Nassau County, Suffolk County, and the five boroughs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Has the Hochul tort reform passed yet?

As of April 30, 2026, no. Both the comparative-negligence amendment and the joint-and-several reform are part of the 2026-2027 budget negotiations in Albany. The legislature has not voted on a final bill. Trial-lawyer associations are actively opposing both proposals; insurance and ride-share industry groups are supporting them. We will update this analysis as the legislative situation changes.

If I was in an accident before the reform passes, am I affected?

No — generally speaking. Tort reforms apply prospectively to accidents that occur after the statute’s effective date. If your accident occurred before reform takes effect, your case will be evaluated under the law in effect at the time of the accident. That said, you should still talk to an attorney quickly because evidence preservation and statute-of-limitations issues are unaffected.

Does this affect New York’s no-fault insurance system?

No. The proposed reforms are amendments to the negligence (tort) framework — CPLR §1411 and §1601. New York’s no-fault insurance system, codified in Insurance Law Article 51 and 11 NYCRR Part 65, is a separate body of law that handles your initial medical bills and lost-wage benefits regardless of fault. Our comprehensive no-fault insurance guide covers PIP, IMEs, EUOs, the serious-injury threshold under §5102(d), and how no-fault interacts with tort lawsuits.

Would a 50% bar mean I can’t sue if I was a little bit at fault?

No, only if you are more at fault than the other driver. Under the proposed 50% bar, you can still recover — at a reduced amount — as long as your percentage of fault is 50% or below. If you are 51% at fault, recovery is barred. The exact threshold (50% versus 51%) depends on the final bill text. New York’s current rule has no threshold at all — you recover regardless of percentage.

What changes if I’m an innocent passenger in someone else’s car?

Under current law: you can collect the full judgment against any at-fault defendant under joint-and-several principles, even one who was only 1% at fault. Under the proposed joint-and-several reform: deep-pocket defendants found less than 50% at fault would only pay their proportional share — meaning your total recoverable damages depend on the coverage of every at-fault defendant, not just the one with the largest policy. This is the change that affects innocent passengers most severely. See our analysis above of the Uber/rideshare passenger scenario for detail.

How long do I have to file a lawsuit after a New York car accident?

Three years from the date of the accident under CPLR §214 for personal injury claims. Two years for wrongful death claims under EPTL §5-4.1. Government-vehicle and roadway-defect claims require a Notice of Claim filed within 90 days under General Municipal Law §50-e. None of these deadlines change under the proposed tort reforms.

Should I settle now before reform passes?

Not necessarily. Pending cases will be evaluated under existing law if reform passes prospectively. Settlement decisions should be based on the value of your case — your injuries, the available coverage, the strength of your evidence — not on speculation about legislation. Talk to your attorney about whether the current offer reasonably reflects the case value, not about timing the legislation.

Related Reading

• Partial fault in New York car accidents — how comparative negligence works today
• What happens when fault is disputed in a New York car accident?
• Long Island car accident lawyer — practice page
• Long Island personal injury practice
• New York no-fault insurance law — comprehensive guide
• Long Island Uber & Lyft accident lawyer — rideshare passenger claims
• New York car accident minimum insurance coverage
• Settlement calculator — estimate your case value

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Editor’s note (April 30, 2026): This post analyzes proposed legislation that has not yet been enacted. We will update the post when the budget bill text is finalized and again if any version is signed into law. Until then, all Long Island car accident cases continue to be evaluated under New York’s existing pure comparative negligence rule (CPLR §1411) and existing joint-and-several liability framework (CPLR §1601). For analysis based on the current law rather than the proposed reform, see our partial fault explainer and disputed liability guide.