How disciplined, objective factfinding can build trust, clarify complex disputes and support better decision-making
On the morning of July 4, 2025, catastrophic flooding on the Guadalupe River took 135 lives across the Texas Hill Country. Twenty-eight of them—25 school-aged campers, two young counselors and the camp's co-executive director—were at Camp Mystic, a century-old girls' camp near Hunt. In 2025, the Texas Senate and House General Investigating Committees on the July 2025 Flooding Events asked my colleague, Hon. Michael Massengale (Former), along with fellow investigator and former Harris County prosecutor Casey Garrett, to build an objective record of what happened that night and why. I supported that work, along with our colleague Kim Parks. The work culminated in legislative presentations, hearings and a written report.
Working for the Texas Legislature was different from a standard neutral analysis engagement brought to JAMS. But it was, in every sense that matters, an exercise in objective evaluation—and it taught me something worth sharing with clients who are considering whether a neutral could help them too.
A Mandate to Find Facts, Not Take Sides
The committees were explicit about what they wanted and, just as important, what they didn't. Their report plainly states: “It is not the purpose of this report to definitively resolve the questions of governmental, corporate, and individual responsibility” already being litigated in several pending civil cases. Instead, the charge was to lay out an objective timeline of the decisions and emergency response at Camp Mystic so that legislators would have a complete record to work from.
That boundary is harder to hold than it sounds. Justice Massengale described the discipline this way: An advocate's job is to make the strongest possible case for one side. A neutral's job is to reserve judgment until every side has been heard, and to stay open to the possibility that the right answer sits somewhere neither side is arguing—or somewhere no one has thought to argue at all. Legislators didn't need another advocate. They needed people willing to follow the facts wherever they led, even when that meant no interested party’s perspective was vindicated entirely.
What Neutral Factfinding Actually Looks Like
On paper, “neutral analysis” can sound abstract. In practice, on this engagement, it meant more than 150 voluntary witness interviews, four site visits to Camp Mystic, the review of thousands of pages of testimony from the 2025 legislative hearings and painstaking work through 911 recordings; contemporaneous witness statements; photographs and video; digital media, including mobile phones and watches; and national media coverage. It also meant staying engaged with counsel for the parties in the related civil litigation—attending court hearings and reviewing the transcripts of the ones we couldn't attend—without becoming an advocate for any of them.
That breadth of process is what makes a neutral's conclusions credible to people who have every reason to distrust an outsider's account: grieving families, camp leadership, state officials and citizens who have been closely following the story for a year. Nobody automatically grants that credibility. It must be earned by the process itself, visibly and consistently, from the first interview to the final page.
Why the Track Record Mattered
Justice Massengale and Ms. Garrett have done this kind of work before. Both served as expert investigators for the 2022 legislative investigation into the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas. That prior experience is one reason why the committees turned to them again. It's a useful reminder for any client evaluating neutrals: Subject-matter knowledge matters, but so does a demonstrated record of actually staying neutral when the pressure to lean one way or another is real. That discipline is a skill, and like any skill, it shows up more reliably in people who have practiced it under genuine duress. Although this was my first opportunity to serve as a legislative investigator, my 16-plus years as a mediator prepared me to receive information without judgment and to remain open during my analysis.
Where This Fits for Other Clients
Legislative investigations are a narrow slice of what neutral analysis can be used for, but the underlying logic travels well beyond the state capitol. Companies facing internal investigations—allegations of policy violations, HR complaints, disputes among board members over an interested transaction—run into the same trust problem on a smaller scale. In-house counsel can get caught in the middle of a disagreement they're also expected to referee. Outside counsel's advice can be quietly discounted because of who is paying them or what result they're assumed to want. Bringing in a genuine neutral—someone insulated from the outcome, not recruited to justify one—can bridge that gap in ways that another advocate simply cannot.
The same is true earlier in a dispute's life, before anyone has filed anything: Pre-litigation risk analysis, letter opinions on regulatory compliance or a second opinion on a claim's real strength can save a client from spending years litigating a position that a neutral, honest look would have flagged early.
A Starting Point, Not a Verdict
The committees' report closes by describing itself as a starting point for reform, not the end of the inquiry. That is, I think, the right way to think about what good neutral analysis offers any client: not a verdict handed down, but a clear-eyed, defensible account of where things stand—built with enough discipline and enough process that people who disagree about almost everything else can at least agree on what actually happened. That's a modest-sounding goal. In our experience, it's also a rare and valuable one.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
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