Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
When people talk about accountability for harm, they usually picture a bad actor: a reckless officer, a negligent manager, a drug-using semi-driver. Sometimes that picture is accurate. But many of the most persistent and devastating harms in modern society are not produced solely by rogue villains. They are produced by systems doing what they were designed—or allowed—to do.
These are the harms that repeat. They appear in slightly different forms, in different places, with different victims, but they follow the same underlying patterns. And they are precisely the harms our legal system struggles to address in a way that actually prevents recurrence.
Not all system-caused harms are equally suited for deeper, collaborative inquiry. Some cases are one-off tragedies. But there is a class of harms where litigation alone—however righteous—fails to generate learning, improvement, or prevention.
This process is always victim-centered, and so it is only appropriate for cases whee victims want to go beyond court remedies, to understand how this happened. They want assurance that it won’t simply happen again to someone else. They want their experience to mean something beyond their own case.
These are the systems where a broader dialogue, humanistic research, and culture-shaping process can do real work.
There are four features that tend to make a system a strong candidate.
First, the harm is recurring and structurally produced, not accidental. The same type of injury, death, or rights violation happens again and again, even when individual actors differ. This tells us the problem is not just “who,” but “how.”
Second, responsibility is fragmented across many actors. No single person or department experiences the full consequences of failure. Liability is spread across agencies, contractors, insurers, vendors, or layers of bureaucracy. Each piece can plausibly claim it was not the decisive cause.
Third, the harm carries high moral weight but low operational clarity. The public rightly feels something is deeply wrong, but there is no shared, practical understanding of what would actually reduce harm tomorrow. Outrage outpaces understanding, and institutions respond defensively rather than reflectively.
Fourth, the system operates with closed or distorted feedback loops. Information about harm enters mainly through crises, lawsuits, or public scandals, rather than through sustained, trust-based engagement with those affected. Learning arrives as punishment, not insight.
When all four of these features are present, litigation can assign blame—but it rarely produces change.
Several domains consistently meet these criteria.
Custodial and carceral systems are a prime example. Jails, prisons, juvenile detention facilities, and inpatient psychiatric units generate predictable patterns of medical neglect, suicide, violence, and dehumanization. Staff turnover is high. Oversight is fragmented. Litigation establishes constitutional floors but rarely addresses how staffing ratios, fatigue, privatization, training doctrine, and moral injury interact to produce harm. These systems are legally regulated yet culturally opaque.
Police-caused harms, including excessive force and wrongful death, also fit this pattern. Individual officers may make the final decision, but those decisions are shaped by training, dispatch protocols, departmental culture, union rules, prosecutorial incentives, political signaling, and fear conditioning. Civil-rights litigation can declare that a line was crossed, but it rarely yields a shared understanding—among officers or communities—of how threat perception is formed or how escalation could realistically be reduced under real-world conditions.
Housing and property management systems, especially large apartment complexes, quietly generate another class of recurring harm. Violence, unsafe conditions, and neglect are routinely framed as “third-party acts,” even when environmental design, security practices, lighting, access control, and management decisions make harm foreseeable. Responsibility is split among owners, managers, contractors, municipalities, and insurers. Lawsuits resolve individual cases, but the system rarely learns.
Childcare, schools, and youth-serving institutions are similarly structured. Supervision failures, abuse, and reporting breakdowns occur under predictable pressures: understaffing, ambiguous authority, fear of reputational damage, and legal defensiveness. Litigation focuses on compliance with rules, not on whether those rules make sense given developmental realities and institutional constraints.
Healthcare-adjacent systems, particularly emergency departments, behavioral health facilities, and long-term care settings, also produce systemic harm. Patients are injured not primarily by bad medicine, but by triage pressure, fragmented responsibility, documentation overload, and staffing shortages. Malpractice law addresses deviations from standards of care, but rarely examines whether those standards are realistic under actual conditions.
Even transportation and logistics networks—trucking fleets, delivery systems, municipal vehicle operations—fit the pattern. Accidents recur. Verdicts accumulate. Policies shift quietly. But there is little honest synthesis of how incentives, scheduling, fatigue, and technology interact to produce predictable failure.
What unites all of these systems is not malice, but misalignment. Incentives reward throughput over care. Policies assume ideal conditions that rarely exist. Feedback arrives too late and in too adversarial a form to guide improvement.
In these contexts, money alone does not fix the problem. But neither does outrage.
What is missing is a structured way to treat harm as information—something to be studied, integrated, and translated into practical change. Humanistic research, dialogue processes, and systems-level analysis are not soft alternatives to accountability. They complete accountability by insisting that when harm occurs, responsibility includes the duty to learn, to integrate, and to change.
I came to personal-injury and civil-rights law because I believed in accountability. I still do. When a jury returns a verdict, it is often doing something profound: it is saying that a system failed in a way that society finds unacceptable. These verdicts are not automatic. They are not sympathy payouts. They are judgments that something went wrong badly enough that money must change hands.
And yet, after years inside the system and now some time outside it, I’ve come to see a deep and uncomfortable truth: tort law is very good at assigning blame and very bad at producing learning.
That is not because the lawyers inside it are careless or cynical. It’s because the system is built around a narrow contest that consumes nearly all of the available attention. Litigation is an arena. Inside that arena, everything is optimized for winning a specific fight—establishing duty, breach, causation, and damages, persuading a jury, managing risk, forcing settlement. The incentives are intense and totalizing. If you are not focused on the immediate case, you lose.
In an adversarial system, each side is rewarded for a different kind of distortion. Defense lawyers are incentivized to fracture causation, diffuse responsibility, and emphasize ambiguity. Plaintiff lawyers, by necessity, are incentivized to do the opposite: to compress complexity into stories that generate moral clarity and emotional force.
That simplification is strategic. Juries must be able to grasp a case and act on it. But what makes a story persuasive in a courtroom is often what makes it incomplete as a guide for institutional change. The overlapping pressures, incentives, cultural norms, and small decisions that actually produce harm tend to be flattened into clearer rules and violations.
From the standpoint of a jury, this works. Juries decide cases one at a time, under strict constraints. From the standpoint of a corporate executive, a police chief, or a public administrator, the lesson is often too thin. The verdict signals that a line was crossed, but not how the system drifted there—or what combination of training, staffing, incentives, or cultural change would realistically prevent recurrence.
Tort law is effective at declaring failure. It is far less reliable at mapping the full architecture of how that failure came to be
The problem is compounded by muted and delayed consequences. Liability insurance absorbs consequence to systems, and their leadership, by paying for settlements or verdicts alike. Information is filtered back to leadership through defense teams, if at all, who reframe it. Responsibility is fragmented across departments, vendors, insurers, and contractors. By the time the financial signal becomes clear, the original decision-makers are often gone. The system never quite feels the full weight of what it has produced.
Even when a case settles or results in a large verdict, any opportunity for learning is stopped in its tracks. Files are closed. Non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements are signed. Lawyers move on to the next case because that is where the next paycheck comes from. There is no financial incentive to stay with the problem once the dispute is resolved. The system does not accumulate wisdom; it churns outcomes.
Victims feel this acutely. They are told—often sincerely—that their case will “make sure this never happens again.” And sometimes small changes do occur. But too often, what actually happens is quieter and more dispiriting: a payout, a revised policy memo, a training slide deck, and then a return to business as usual. The conditions that produced the harm remain largely intact.
None of this means tort law is illegitimate. It remains one of the few tools ordinary people have to confront powerful institutions. It forces disclosure. It creates leverage. It affirms that harm matters.
But we should be honest about its limits.
If our goal is not only compensation but prevention—if we genuinely want the last victim to be the last—then we need something more than episodic outrage and financial transfer from liability insurers to victims. We need processes that treat harm as a signal, not just a bill.
That means stepping outside the adversarial frame, at least part of the time. It means asking different questions: not just “Who violated a duty?” but “What features of this system made harm likely?” Not just “What argument will persuade a jury?” but “What constraints do real humans operate under, and what changes would actually work?”
It means involving victims not only as plaintiffs but as observers of how systems behave under stress. It means synthesizing patterns across cases rather than treating each one as sui generis. It means separating financial resolution from truth development, so that learning can continue even after liability is closed.
Ironically, litigation itself is often the best funding mechanism for this deeper work. Liability insurers already pay to make problems go away. Many would quietly prefer to understand why those problems keep recurring, and prefer to fund de-risking processes. But the current legal culture gives them temporary closure without comprehension.
The answer is not to abolish tort law or to moralize about lawyers who operate within it. The answer is to admit that we are using a narrow tool to solve a broad problem—and then to build the missing layer.
Until we create ways to turn verdicts and settlements into durable knowledge about how systems fail and how they can change, we will keep doing what we do now: fighting hard, telling compelling stories, moving money—and then watching the same harms happen again.
Truth & Repair Process Design is the intentional creation of a new container for discovery, truth-telling, and learning, separate from adversarial processes..
My role is to:
How the Process Typically Unfolds
Each process is custom-designed, but most include:
1. Container Design & Buy-In
2. System Landscape Discovery
Instead of compressing facts, the process expands them:
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:
Not everyone must agree.
But everyone must be heard accurately.
4. Shared Sense-Making
Through facilitated dialogue and synthesis, the group works toward:
5. Repair & System Improvement
Only after clarity emerges does the conversation turn toward:
Nothing is predetermined.
Next Steps
Most engagements begin quietly, through referral or conversation.
If you are:
I’m open to an exploratory conversation to determine whether this kind of process is appropriate.
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