What’s Going on With Georgia’s State-Wide Business Court?

Kade Cullefer, director of state affairs with Troutman Pepper Locke’s Troutman Strategies team, was quoted in the August 24, 2026, Daily Report article, “What’s Going On With Georgia’s State-Wide Business Court?“

• Though South Carolina doesn’t publish business court statistics online, it has 11 judges, “so you can tell the volume is meaningful there,” said Kade Cullefer, a director of state affairs at Troutman Strategies who was part of the 2017 Georgia court reform counsel that recommended establishing a business court.
• Other states report numbers of new cases filed per year in the triple digits. Texas, whose court is coming up on its second birthday, is projected to be the fastest-growing business court in the country, according to Cullefer.
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• According to Cullefer, the issue isn’t with the court itself but in how cases get there in the first place.
• Up until this year, litigating a case in Georgia’s business court requires two-party consent. Meanwhile, “in other states, one party can transfer to the business court as a matter of right similar to federal court, so long as the subject matter lines up as well as the amount in controversy,” Cullefer said. However, some parties would prefer to keep things in state court to slow down proceedings, creating pressure to settle by driving up litigation costs.
• Cullefer said that opposition to single-party removal has largely come from the plaintiff’s bar, “because they feel like it might be a back-door hook to bring in personal injury claims,” such as situations where a breach of contract claim also involves a fraud tort.
• “They feel like the business court is probably more sympathetic to corporate defendants,” Cullefer added, noting he thinks it is very unlikely this specific scenario could happen. “I don’t know that to be true, but it’s a water that they don’t want to test.”
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• “Now that was just passed earlier this session [and] just became effective about a month ago,” Cullefer said. “You’ve got to have board meetings, you’ve got to have resolutions amending these documents, so I think it’s a little bit too early to tell what effect that’s had on the caseload and the case volume, but I do think that is a way to drive up some traffic to the business court.”
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• “Ultimately though, the key is to get single party removal as a matter of right,” Cullefer said.