Baylor Law School alum Matthew Maupin (JD ‘22) always wanted to be a litigator. And if you want to be a litigator in Texas, there’s no question about where to go for your education.
“They call it the boot camp of law school, and that’s for good reason,” he said. “It produces fine litigators, but part of what it does is it teaches you that you can always do more than what you think you’re capable of.”
Even so, Maupin never predicted achieving as much as he and the hundreds of other volunteers accomplished this past summer in Kerrville.
On July 4, the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry converged with additional moisture coming from the Pacific Ocean to facilitate some of the strongest inclement weather in memory. Around four months’ worth of rain fell in a matter of days, wreaking havoc at breathtaking speed. At one point, the Guadalupe River’s waters rose about 26 feet in less than an hour. By the time the floodwaters began receding, at least 135 local residents had lost their lives, with the region sustaining more than $1 billion in damages.
“It’s one of those things that you go, ‘It’s different when it happens to you.’ I hate to say it, but I feel like I’d become so accustomed to seeing natural disasters on TV,” Maupin said. “But when it happens to you, your whole perspective changes. Your whole life changes.”
It couldn’t have been more personal for him. Maupin grew up in Kerr County before attending the University of Texas at Austin for college in 2011. After finishing his undergraduate degree, he headed straight to law school at Baylor, then joined the San Antonio office of Dykema Gossett PLLC in 2022. While he hasn’t lived in Kerrville for years, Maupin and his wife, Katie, still regularly travel the 45 minutes back to their shared hometown. That was the plan for this past Fourth of July, until a text message from his sister-in-law informed them of impending trouble.
“We were going to go out to my brother-in-law’s ranch in Hunt and eat some brisket. It was going to be a good time, then everything changed real fast,” he remembered.
Instead of seeing family, Maupin and his wife stayed at home, watching local news describe the rapidly deteriorating situation. It didn’t take long before they both felt the urge to do something about it.
“We turned to look at each other, and I just said, ‘Let’s go,’ and Katie said, ‘Alright,’” he recalled.
As his wife packed in their bedroom, Maupin stocked up on gas and drove over to Lowe’s to procure “the biggest chainsaw I could find.” After checking on their own families, they planned to travel the next day to the nearby town of Hunt, where his brother-in-law served as a volunteer firefighter. The “next day,” however, began earlier than Maupin anticipated.
“I got up at about 3 a.m. just because I couldn’t sleep, and I drove towards Kerrville where the road starts to follow the river,” he said. “It was pitch black out there. There was the sheriff’s deputy, and I said, ‘Can I get to Hunt?’ and he said, ‘I honestly don’t know.’”
After navigating a lightless route covered in debris, Maupin eventually did arrive to meet his brother-in-law and fellow emergency response volunteers. As the sun slowly rose to reveal the devastation, the team got to work clearing the roads and powerlines in the hopes that local churches could soon reopen as rescue hubs. Maupin initially spent about a week there before work called him back to San Antonio — but only for a few days at a time.
“It got into a pattern where I would come into the office Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Then I would help [in Kerrville] Thursday evening and all day Saturday through Monday,” he said. “I did that for about a month to a month-and-a-half.”
Seeing the destruction of his local haunts was hard enough, but for Maupin, the ecological toll was also staggering.
“Your entire childhood looks like a war zone. Everything’s gone,” he recounted. “Thousand-year-old cypress trees, just completely torn to pieces. One of the most difficult parts was just seeing the natural scenery and vegetation — that is stuff that took hundreds of years to grow. It’s not something that is meant to change overnight.”
But despite the tragedies, it didn’t take long to find something to anchor him — the hundreds of volunteers at his side.
“I met some of the most selfless people in my entire life. People who dedicated their time and their money, who took time away from work using their own equipment and burning their own fuel,” he said. “All just 100 percent volunteers who wanted nothing in return.”
As important as he knows it is to honor those individuals forever affected by the Central Texas floods, Maupin also stresses the importance of everyone’s shared humanity.
“My life changed forever when I met the people who came out there. That was incredible, it restored something in me. God was present with us every second,” he said.
As for his fellow volunteers, it took them a few days before they realized what Maupin did for a living when not clearing debris and rescuing natural disaster victims.
“I was working with a lot of folks who are tradesmen by nature — construction, landscapers, those kinds of jobs. I’d be working alongside them and all of a sudden, they’d find out what my job is,” he recalled with a laugh. “They were so shocked that I was a lawyer out there. A lot of them just couldn’t believe it.”
According to Maupin, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise for a lawyer from Baylor to be among the workers.
“That’s the difference between a Baylor lawyer and another lawyer,” Maupin mused. “I think I learned a lot of resolve in law school — resolve that helped me get up every morning after working 17-hour days and think, ‘Alright, let’s keep going.’”
