Court likely next stop as overhaul of Child Victims Act is signed into law

Lawyers representing men and women who were abused as children while in state custody said newly signed legislation will lead to court challenges and a wave of lawsuits over the next five weeks.

Gov. Wes Moore (D) and legislative leaders on Tuesday signed House Bill 1378 into law, which will cut in half potential awards to victims that were promised just two years ago in legislation that was hailed for giving survivors another chance to have their day in court.

But that led to claims by thousands of men and women who were sexually abused while in state custody, opening the door to potentially budget-crushing financial awards and sparking the rush to pass HB1378, which takes effect June 1.

D. Todd Mathews, an attorney with Bailey & Glasser, said his firm would be part of a challenge to the new law.

“We will vigorously oppose this clearly unconstitutional bill, in order to protect the Survivors, as the State and Governor Moore have clearly failed them,” Mathews said in an email.

Washington, D.C.-based Bailey & Glasser is one of nearly two dozen firms representing more than 4,500 plaintiffs. The coalition of firms has been in active negotiations with the Maryland Attorney General’s office since 2023.

Mathews and Ryan S. Perlin, an attorney at Baltimore-based Bekman, Marder, Hopper, Malarkey & Perlin, said the newly signed law could face several potential constitutional challenges.

“It’s all but a certainty that this will be challenged,” Perlin said Tuesday morning.

With a June 1 effective date, survivors have until May 31 to file a lawsuit under the old law, which caps damages at $1.5 million per occurrence for private institutions and $890,000 per occurrence against government entities. On June 1, those caps fall to $700,000 and $400,000, respectively.

Perlin said those reductions, as well as the five-week filing window, will likely be challenged, along with the difference in how the law treats lawsuits against private and public institutions.

The bill also caps the fees that can be paid to attorneys representing survivors.

“That will have a chilling effect, making it harder for survivors to find a lawyer who will represent them,” said Perlin, whose firm announced last week that it had filed a new group of lawsuits against Towson-based Calvert Hall College High School under the current law

The bill was one of 142 signed into law at the second ceremony following the 2025 session. That second tranche of new laws included bills affecting expungement of criminal records, the Second Look Act and legislation to aid federal workers whose jobs have been eliminated by President Donald Trump.

Moore did not comment on the Child Victims Act changes during remarks delivered before the bill signing. When asked for comment, a spokesperson for the office repeated a statement from last week, that “acknowledged the trauma” survivors have faced, but said the bill would “continue to allow the survivors to seek justice while preserving the long-term fiscal stability of the state.””

Lisae Jordan, executive director and counsel at Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault, said she hoped the state would make more services available to people who were abused in state facilities.

The muted comment at Tuesday’s signing was a vastly different affair than two years ago when Moore praised passage of the Child Victims Act and throngs of survivors traveled to Annapolis for the bill signing.

That 2023 law eliminated time restrictions during which survivors of institutional sexual abuse had to file lawsuits. It also set the $1.5 million and $890,000 caps on awards per “occurrence” of abuse — a term over which plaintiff’s attorneys and some lawmakers disagree.

At the time, the focus was on the substantial number of cases expected to arise out of the Catholic church sex abuse scandal, and the Archdiocese of Baltimore filed for bankruptcy protection in advance of the 2023 law taking effect.

Criminal record expungement, parole reform measures signed into law

At the same time, hundreds of cases against the state, including the Department of Juvenile Services, began to surface. Lawmakers were warned in January of billions in potential liabilities from an estimated 3,500 cases. Those alone would have dire budgetary consequences.

Since then, a coalition of attorneys has said they have nearly 6,000 cases. And those cases are believed to be just the start.

Two weeks ago, Levy Konigsberg, a New York-based law firm that is part of the coalition, filed lawsuits on behalf of 221 men and women in connection with sexual abuse allegations at 15 state juvenile detention facilities. The lawsuits bring the number of claims handled by Levy Konigsberg alone to roughly 2,000, according to the firm.

Del. C.T. Wilson (D-Charles), who sponsored the 2023 bill, stepped in to author the changes in HB1378, which he called an attempt to ease the potential financial burden to the state while giving survivors the opportunity to seek justice.

“This bill does nothing to change the amounts [government] is going to pay out,” said Perlin, who said lawyers will rush “thousands of cases” to the courthouses in the next five weeks in order to come in under the current, higher caps.

That rush of cases could potentially slow the judicial system and its existing workload of criminal and civil cases to a crawl.

It is likely that victims’ claims and legal challenges to the new law will move simultaneously.

Lawyers could seek a temporary injunction before the end of May, to put the law on hold while courts determine its constitutionality; or attorneys representing the survivors could hold off on a challenge until June 1, when the new law takes effect.

A third scenario would bring a challenge to the law after survivors start appealing the resolution of individual cases, according to Perlin. Mathews agreed, adding that scenario could take years to resolve.