A Marathon Strategies study released August 21, 2026 documents something the nuclear verdict literature has largely missed: 2025 was not only a severity story. It was a frequency story. Governmental enforcement involvement dropped from 70% of organizations in 2024 to 56% in 2025, the largest single-year decline in Marathon’s tracking history. Disputes that previously closed through OSHA citations, EEOC conciliations, and consent decrees are entering civil litigation, reaching juries, and producing nuclear verdicts. The study counted 190 nuclear verdicts exceeding $10 million against corporate defendants in 2025, a record.
From tracking GL claim resolution patterns across public entity portfolios over the past several years, the inflection point where regulatory conciliation gave way to civil litigation has been visible in development triangles since 2023. The Marathon data puts a number on the mechanism for the first time.
Who it affects
Self-insured employers across labor-intensive, consumer-facing, and regulated industries carry the highest exposure. The regulatory retreat is sharpest in labor and employment, environmental, and consumer protection areas, which map directly to GL exposure categories for hospitals, universities, large employers, and public entities.
Public entities face a compounding effect. Reduced qualified immunity protections and reduced DOJ civil rights enforcement both funnel Section 1983 and institutional abuse disputes toward jury trial. A county or transit authority that previously saw claims resolved through conciliation agreements now watches those same fact patterns proceed to verdict in federal court, producing a double-frequency effect on the GL triangle.
The reserve mechanism
Trade press has treated the Marathon data as a severity story: note how large the verdicts are, then adjust excess attachment points. For self-insured reserve programs, the more pressing question involves frequency and development pattern.
Claims that previously resolved through regulatory channels at 12 to 24 months of maturity are now staying open to 36 to 48 months as they proceed through civil litigation to jury verdict. Link ratios calibrated during the 2018 to 2022 period, when regulatory enforcement was near peak, assume a resolution mix that no longer exists. GL development triangles built from those accident years carry an embedded assumption: that a meaningful share of open disputes resolves at agency pace, not court pace. That assumption is now wrong.
The juror composition shift reinforces the development-pattern risk. In 2016, 90% of respondents told Marathon they believed there was too much litigation in the U.S. By 2025, that share had fallen to 56%. Millennial and Gen Z jurors, now the majority of most jury pools, are considerably more skeptical of corporate defendants. The combination produces both more cases reaching trial and higher verdicts when they do. Case reserves calibrated to regulatory-settlement exposure need to be re-estimated at jury-trial exposure values, which are substantially higher.
Self-insureds using development patterns from 2018 to 2022 are systematically understating both the frequency of claims that reach jury trial and the average maturity at which those claims close. On severity, the premises liability nuclear verdict analysis from August 21 addresses the case reserve gap for claims already in the pipeline. The frequency and pattern problem runs deeper: it affects how many claims eventually get there.
What this means for your next review
Put two questions to your actuary before the next reserve study. First: which accident years anchor the link ratios and tail factors in the GL triangle, and what share of claims in those years closed through regulatory or agency channels rather than civil litigation? If the development pattern was built from 2018 to 2022 data, the underlying resolution mix has shifted. Second: are case reserves on open claims where the claimant has filed a civil complaint (rather than a regulatory charge) still set at regulatory-settlement values, or have they been reestimated at jury-trial exposure?
For public entity programs, the public entity GL IBNR framework addresses the tail factors specific to Section 1983 and sovereign immunity exposure. For the broader question of which signals indicate a development pattern has become unreliable, the five leading indicators of adverse reserve development provides the diagnostic checklist.