Truth & Repair Process Design

Support for What Comes After the Case

If you’ve been through a serious harm—especially one that led to a lawsuit, settlement, or verdict—you may be asking a quiet but important question:

“What happens now?”

For many people, the legal case resolves something—but not everything.

You may feel that:

• your story was narrowed to fit a courtroom
• important parts of what happened were never really heard
• the system that caused the harm is still broken
• others may suffer the same way you did
• you don’t want more fighting, but you do want something to change

Truth & Repair Process Design is a way of supporting people at this exact moment.

Adversarial systems reward certainty, outrage, and simplicity.  This warps the data-collection, the framework of who listens, and the resolution of how well problems are understood.  Litigation is a system for producing financial wins, not understanding or deeper systems change.  

It takes vast amounts of complex reality and compresses it into a story designed to win. 

That is how large verdicts are won.
That is how settlements are forced.

And almost without exception, those verdicts and settlements are paid by insurance companies that also controlled the defense and defense-lawyer team, buffering the flow of information, and consequence. The underlying system—the corporation, the agency, the institution—often never has to truly see what it did, understand why it made sense at the time, or confront how it is likely to fail again.

Clients feel vindicated. They receive money. Their immediate lives may stabilize.

But the systems don’t change.
They don’t learn.
And the same harms keep happening to other people.

After enough time inside that machinery, I became less interested in winning cases and more interested in something litigation is structurally bad at producing: truth that can actually change systems.

What Changes Outside the Adversarial Frame

When the adversarial process pauses—whether through resolution, exhaustion, or deliberate choice—it becomes possible to examine new questions.

In a non-adversarial, victim-centered, co-designed process:

• Institutions are no longer performing for a judge, jury, insurer, or headline.
• Participants are not rewarded for certainty or punished for nuance.
• Lawyers are not filtering every word for risk management.
• Systems are no longer insulated by procedural defense.

This shift is everything.

It allows people to move from defense to reflection, from posturing to learning, and from liability avoidance to responsibility-taking.

But that shift does not happen on its own.

It has to be designed.

What Is Truth & Repair Process Design?

Truth & Repair Process Design is the intentional creation of a new container for discovery, truth-telling, and learning, separate from adversarial processes.

It is a facilitated, victim-centered inquiry that brings together people who would never be able to see the same landscape while litigation logic is still running the show.

The work begins by changing the conditions under which truth is sought.

The Role I Play

I am brought in precisely because I understand both worlds:

• I understand litigation, insurance dynamics, and adversarial strategy.
• And I have cultivated a fundamentally different way of working—one oriented toward truth, dignity, and system learning rather than victory.

My role is to:

• negotiate participation with institutions and decision-makers
• design a container that protects victims and allows receptivity
• ensure the process does not become PR, coercion, or premature reconciliation
• facilitate a discovery and truth-telling process that can tolerate ambiguity
• help groups see not just what went wrong, but why it made sense at the time
• hold the possibility of system improvement without scripting outcomes

In short, I place a punctuation mark at the end of adversarial combat and open a different chapter.

How the Process Typically Unfolds

Each process is custom-designed, but most include:

1. Container Design & Buy-In

• Clarifying purpose, scope, and boundaries
• Negotiating participation
• Establishing confidentiality and ethical guardrails
• Ensuring victims retain control and choice

2. System Landscape Discovery

Instead of compressing facts, the process expands them:

• incentives
• constraints
• decision environments
• information bottlenecks
• cultural norms
• regulatory and financial pressures

The goal is not exoneration or blame, but accurate understanding.

3. Truth-Telling Without Performance

Participants are invited to speak without needing to persuade, defend, or posture.

This includes:

• harmed individuals and families
• frontline workers
• managers and executives
• policymakers or regulators
• others affected who were never part of the original case

Not everyone must agree.
But everyone must be heard accurately.

4. Shared Sense-Making

Through facilitated dialogue and synthesis, the group works toward:

• a shared map of reality
• clarity about what is known and unknown
• agreement on where systems are misaligned or fragile
• recognition of where change is both necessary and possible

5. Repair & System Improvement

Only after clarity emerges does the conversation turn toward:

• structural changes
• policy redesign
• training or oversight
• non-financial remedies
• forward-looking commitments

Nothing is predetermined.

Who This Is For

This work is appropriate when:

• serious harm has occurred
• adversarial processes have reached their limits
• systems are insulated, defensive, or fragmented
• people want prevention, not just compensation
• complexity deserves respect, not simplification

It is especially relevant in:

• deaths or severe injuries involving public systems
• policing, incarceration, or custody contexts
• environmental or public-health harm
• recurring institutional failures
• large cases that reveal deeper systemic problems

Next Steps

Most engagements begin quietly, through referral or conversation.

If you are:

• a person or family asking “what comes after the case?”
• an attorney supporting a client who wants more than money
• an institution seeking to learn rather than posture
• a funder interested in prevention and repair

I’m open to an exploratory conversation to determine whether this kind of process is appropriate.