Telephone Consults

with Missouri Employment Lawyer Tim Willoughby

I can consult by telephone with anyone in Missouri who wishes to speak with me. If you are reading this and you are not located in Missouri, I may or may not agree to consult with you, but you can call my office and we’ll see - it depends on a lot of things.

There aren’t many lawyers who concentrate in employment law, so people often have to go long distances to get a consultation. Until I refined my telephone consult procedure, it had always been awkward to try to consult with Missourians from far outside the St. Louis area. The trip to St. Louis might be long, and I might have an abrupt change in my schedule that means I must reschedule the appointment, but I can’t reach the client because the client is already on the road from who-knows-where.

I’ve figured out how to work around these problems in some types of cases. Depending on the case, it might be acceptable to perform the consultation by telephone. If I have to charge a consult fee, the fee can be paid by MasterCard of Visa. I’ve tried this and it works well.

Steps we’ll take in performing a telephone consult

If you want to consult long distance, and if I must charge a consult fee, here is how it will work (and this works acceptably well even if your need is urgent):

• If a fee must be charged, you can pay using a credit card (we’ll take your card info over the phone).
• You will forward some documents to me, the same documents I would want to see if we were to meet in the office. Documents can be faxed or shipped overnight to me (but it’s best to only ship photocopies).
• Then we talk. I usually have you call me at an appointed time, and you have my attention for the duration of the consult just as you would in the office. The time is yours; you’ve paid for it.

Other resources on this site that may be useful:

• See Tim’s Services and Fees for more details of how fees and consults work.
• Closer to Kansas City than St. Louis? Then see Kansas City Employment Law Inquiries.
• See also my article on Deciding what to do … suing, etc., and the links in that article, for much more info about how complex employment law consults can get. Employment law isn’t as straightforward as other areas of law.
• See What is a Worthwhile Case?