Indiana lawmakers have an important question to answer as they work through this legislative session: will they choose to lower costs for Hoosier households? There are several measures on the table that would accomplish this, but there is one in particular we want to highlight here—H.B. 1417, authored by Rep. Matt Lehman (R-79).

Alongside commonsense reforms to protect small business owners from unjust liability, the bill would place a $1 million upper limit on the amount of noneconomic damages* that can be awarded in a civil lawsuit. Enacting that limit would build on Indiana’s existing damages reforms, and would be a positive change for two reasons:

1. By preventing out-of-control nuclear verdicts, this reform would ensure that noneconomic compensatory awards are truly about compensation, rather than running up the score and maximizing the lawyer’s payday.
2. Preventing nuclear verdicts also prevents nuclear settlements, and together, those factors could play a major role in reducing costs for Indiana’s entire tort system. In fact, according to preliminary data from a forthcoming ILR research paper**, putting a ceiling on noneconomic damages in all civil cases would have saved Indiana approximately $1.4 billion in tort costs in 2022 (the last year of available tort cost data)—which works out to over $500 per household in the state.

At a moment when many consumers are anxious about rising prices, reforms like this one offer a clear path to cut costs. Florida provides an excellent example. Though Florida’s 2022 and 2023 reforms addressed different issues than Indiana H.B. 1417, they were specifically aimed at reducing tort system costs. The result has been story after story about double-digit insurance rate decreases and even refunds going directly to Floridians.

Lawsuit reform is the driver behind those savings, and there’s nothing mysterious about it—reduce costs, and prices fall. So Indiana lawmakers have a pretty clear choice when it comes to H.B. 1417: do they want to use this tool to reduce costs for households, or not?

*Noneconomic damages are awarded for harms that don’t come with an obvious price tag—emotional distress, pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment, and the like.

**Expected publication: late January-early February 2026. Readers can find ILR’s research publications at https://instituteforlegalreform.com/research/.