Marathon's 2025 corporate dollars and the current Hellholes eight do not rank the same states.
Two Georgia products verdicts, one against Ford Motor Co. and one against Bayer AG, were each over $2 billion. Why is that state still a reform credit on your book?
Marathon Strategies puts those two awards at the center of Corporate Verdicts Go Thermonuclear: 2026 Edition, released August 18, 2026. The report says Georgia was the top state for corporate nuclear verdicts in 2025, at $4.9 billion across 10 cases, back in the upper tier after a weaker prior year. The same pages say a $3.8 billion award against the now-defunct Real Water put Nevada in the number two slot for the first time. Marathon's account is that Real Water's products were found contaminated with a chemical from rocket fuel. That finding belongs to the verdicts as Marathon reports them. It is not our finding. Do not treat $3.8 billion as Nevada's state total. The public pages tie the rank to that award and to a series of Real Water verdicts. They do not print a Nevada sum.
The census under those headlines is easy to quote and easy to misuse.
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The report page says 190 lawsuits against a corporate defendant produced a nuclear verdict in 2025. The press release the same day calls the same publication nearly 200 jury verdicts of at least $10 million. Use 190 for the count. Use "nearly 200" only as Marathon's rounding. The report page says the sum was over $25.6 billion. The release says more than $25.6 billion. The count was up 40.7% from 2024. Marathon calls 190 the largest single-year count it has identified since 2009. More than 40 verdicts exceeded $100 million, Marathon's thermonuclear line, for the second year in a row. Four were over $1 billion. The edition counts the jury's gross award. Later cuts, remittiturs, and reversals are not backed out. Do not book more than $25.6 billion as loss paid.
The edition also puts the 2025 median at $32.5 million and says that median fell after four years of growth. Marathon's own explanation is mix: more awards near the $10 million line pulled the middle down while the sum stayed high. Since 2020, the same report says the count is up 476%, the sum is up 422%, and the median is up 51%. Both statements are Marathon's. The book got wider and the total got larger. The middle case did not set the new record.
This is not the Litigation Sentinel public-source board. Read on September 30, 2026, that board shows 44 nuclear verdicts and $7.9 billion, 2026 only, public sources only, complete through August, paywalled and unpublished matters excluded. Marathon's 190 and more than $25.6 billion is a 2025 full-year census of corporate defendants. The press release says it was built from National Law Review VerdictSearch, LexisNexis Jury Verdicts and Settlements, and state and federal court records. Different year. Corporate defendants only, versus a public-source screen that is not a corporate filter. Different source bar. The board is not a monthly update of Marathon. Marathon is not the board. Do not add 44 to 190. Do not put 190 on the map.
The useful comparison is the other list in this genre, and it is not a second lead.
The American Tort Reform Foundation's current Judicial Hellholes report is the 2025-2026 edition, announced December 9, 2025. It names eight courts. It is not a national ranking of verdict dollars. In the order ATRF published: Los Angeles; New York City; South Carolina asbestos litigation; Louisiana coastal litigation; the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas; St. Louis; Cook, Madison, and St. Clair counties in Illinois; and King County with the Washington Supreme Court. ATRF says a Los Angeles jury's $1 billion talc verdict, for a single plaintiff it described as 88, in a mesothelioma case, is what moved Los Angeles to No. 1. That is ATRF's account. We did not open a judgment in that case. ATRF also said, in that December 9 release, that Cook, Madison, and St. Clair counties were home to nearly half of asbestos filings nationwide "last year." Fraud allegations, asbestos dockets, and what ATRF calls junk science are its characterizations of those courts. They are not findings of this newsletter.
Georgia is not on that eight. The Hellholes archive lists Georgia at No. 4 in the 2024-2025 report. The current edition moves the state to the watch list and narrows the concern to Gwinnett, Fulton, and Cobb, after what ATRF describes as a reform package from the governor and the legislature. Nevada is not on the eight. Florida is not on the eight. Neither is on the six-place watch list, which is the Georgia county trio, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Texas, the Michigan Supreme Court, Louisiana, and Kentucky.
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Marathon's dollar map does not follow that demotion. The press release says Nevada, Texas, California, and Florida round out the top five behind Georgia. Florida, Marathon says, returned to that top five with 20 nuclear verdicts in 2025, after 2023 tort reform had appeared to reduce this activity the next year. Texas is the real overlap: a Marathon top-five state by dollars, and only a Hellholes watch-list state. ATRF's December 9 writeup on Texas emphasizes the attorney general's pharmaceutical suits, not this jury census.
Pennsylvania runs the other way, and it is the sentence that keeps this from becoming "reform failed everywhere." Marathon says Pennsylvania fell from 12 corporate nuclear verdicts totaling $3.4 billion in 2024 to two verdicts totaling $29.3 million in 2025. That is a state total. The Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas is still No. 5. ATRF says nuclear verdicts there have reached historic levels. A collapsed state sum is not an all-clear for that court.
Use the documents for different jobs. Hellholes tells you which courts ATRF thinks will try the next file under hostile procedure. Marathon tells you where corporate jury dollars landed in calendar 2025. A committee that retires Georgia or Florida because a bill was signed, or because the state fell off the eight, is reserving a label. Georgia's label improved. Marathon's 2025 dollars did not.
The rest of the release, once. Products liability is still the dollar engine: $12 billion across 29 cases. The verdicts reached 68 industries, compared with 55 in 2024 and 48 in 2023, in 28 states and 97 courts. The report page says that state count was down six from the year before. Eight states passed significant tort reform in 2025. Marathon says it found no major state law that year that significantly expanded potential verdict amounts. It also says attorney advertising now exceeds $2.5 billion a year, and that it expects the trend to continue in 2026 because settlements are getting harder to reach. PFAS, generative AI, and climate claims are on Marathon's forward list. That expectation is theirs.
Price the 2025 corporate year off Marathon. Price in-year 2026 public awards off the board, and only through the August stamp it actually carries. Price procedure off the 2025-2026 Hellholes list, not off a 2024 rank you remember. Do not let any one of the three stand in for the other two.
If open files in Georgia, Florida, or Nevada are still reserved off a 2023 reform memo or a 2024 Hellholes rank, the reserve is on the old label.
Reply with the one state where you still take a reform discount.
Wesley Todd
Litigation Sentinel
Marathon edition text for two figures the public pages do not print: 2025 median $32.5 million, and gross-award method (cuts and remittiturs not backed out). Fact lock M-MEDIAN and M-GROSS. Not a public URL. The report PDF is not linked.
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