The Who and the Why behind “Tim’s Missouri Employment Law”, with a Timeline of site development

• Who is behind TimsLaw.com
• Why build TimsLaw.com - the Purposes
• Timeline of development

Who is behind TimsLaw.com?

(Please don’t send me a fax unless you’ve called me first and I’ve agreed to accept your fax)

• About Tim Willoughby (Tim’s bio)
• Contacting Tim (email instructions, fees, consults, directions, etc . . .)
• Directions and map to Tim’s office in the Kirkwood area of St. Louis County

Why: The evolution and purpose of the
Tim’s Missouri Employment Law website

The Tim’s Missouri Employment Law website is a marriage of two major goals I had: 1 - Teach people about employment law as a public service, and 2 - Give people a way to learn something about me and what I do, so that I am not just another name in the Yellow Pages.

In my early days of law school in 1994, I developed a desire to somehow find a way to open a legal clinic for people who could not afford a lawyer. In my original conception for such a clinic, I was going to rent a storefront in the poorer area of St. Louis, and maintain periodic hours assisting people with their legal problems. Back in 1994, my goal was to open such a clinic within 10 years of entering law practice. I wanted to give something back. I was, and remain, grateful for having the opportunity to obtain a legal education, an opportunity that was assisted by various government programs that help with financial aid. So I owe something to the general public.

After I completed my legal education and got some experience, I became aware of how unrealistic my original conception for a legal clinic truly was:

• First, I would have to be competent to advise people about the most common kinds of legal problems, like landlord-tenant, family law, wills, bankruptcy, credit and collection matters, consumer law, property law, social security, and other areas. But I did not know very much about those areas of law, and was not practicing in those areas. How was I going to assist people with types of law I did not know well?
• Second, it’s just too expensive to open a storefront, without major financial backing. My practice field, employment law, is not a particularly lucrative area of law. That’s why there are only a relative few employment lawyers - see my article What an employment lawyer is and how to find one for more info. So opening a storefront was not really going to be a viable option.
• Third, poor people in other parts of town would be unserved by a single storefront. In essence, I could only serve a neighborhood, not a community.
• Fourth, the internet began to explode as a communication medium, accessible to everyone through the public libraries.

A website about employment law seemed to be a reasonable alternative to a clinic, for the foreseeable future:

• First, I knew quite a bit about employment law, since that was the bulk of my practice.
• Second, nearly everyone in Missouri works, so an employment law information website could be a great public service.
• Third, almost no one knows much about employment law and the traps.
• Fourth, everyone can access the internet with the help of their local librarian.
• Fifth, a website could also be good for business.

On combining public service with business interests

In the very beginning of my website building experience, I looked at a lot of websites that lawyers had put up. Almost exclusively, the websites were sales brochures for the firms.

I could have put up a sales brochure-type website myself. But that’s not the type of site I wanted. Sales brochure sites do not provide any meaningful public service. Even the State of Missouri’s websites do not provide much useful employment law information. I wanted a website that aspired to be the premier destination for people to seek out when they wanted to learn about their Missouri Employee Rights.

When deciding what to write about, and how much to say, I try to be guided first by the public service goals behind the website. I try to tell it like it is (from my perspective), and give sufficient details so that laymen can comprehend how the system works and learn about their rights.

I have sometimes been torn between the need to eat and the desire to educate. I have sometimes feared that if I tell too much, then maybe too many people will decide they don’t need me. But I usually err on the side of education and exposure of how the system works. However, there are some things that I wish I could talk about more explicitly, but I have deemed certain things to be best reserved for private consultations. I haven’t figured out the best way to tell people that they are not getting the full story; they’re getting a fairly detailed introduction to employment law.

I’m sure many people have their questions answered on this website and I lose their business as a result. But I also gain business from the site, because many thoughtful people appreciate the complexities of employment law and chose to trust a lawyer to do a better job of sorting out their problems than they can themselves. I think I get more business than I lose. I’ll continue to demystify employment law and teach people about their rights, and hope that in the end the business will continue to take care of itself. That’s what has happened so far.

There is nothing unusual about mixing public service with a desire to conduct business:

• Providing public service is a time-honored method of growing your business.
• Many lawyers (and businesspersons of all types) give their time to charitable organizations, and as a result make contact with people who become customers.
• Ever see those invitations to Estate Planning Seminars? Estate planning lawyers give free seminars where they provide a lot of useful free information, in the hope that you will contact them if you decide you need estate planning. Financial planners do this all the time, as well.
• Business lawyers serve on boards and committees of charitable organizations along with other businesspersons, and thereby develop new clients - in fact, if you desire to be promoted to partner in a business law firm, you’d better be doing some charitable work to develop new clients.
• You can bet that lawyers who provide limited free legal services to the public (other than lawyers employed by the formal “Legal Aid” organizations) are probably always on the lookout for that fabulous fee-generating case that might arise from the free legal services they provide. There’s even a book about this phenomenon, called “The Rainmaker”.

Does altruism really exist when businesses are involved?

I recall an argument I had with my professor in an undergraduate business class. The professor argued that businesses often do good works for the public out of a sense of “altruism”, meaning that the businesses do the good deeds purely out of a sense of service and do not hope for, nor expect, any benefit whatsoever. I vigorously disagreed that businesses “often” act altruistically. I said that businesses do good deeds (at minimum) in order to be known as good companies, to improve their reputation and public relations profile, and that such things are tangible benefits to the company that the companies intend to derive from their good deeds. We agreed to disagree, but I still think I was more right than he was. Pure altruism is a very rare thing where a business is concerned.

So here I am with this website that takes a lot of my time, and educates the public about employment law. Yes, it has a strong public service component, and yes, I hope to get some business out of it.

Timeline of the development of www.TimsLaw.com:

• April - Started playing with HTML packages, beginning the learning process. See How I learned website building for more details.
• June - Rudimentary site put up on internet, with 10 to 15 articles, and announced to the Missouri Bar’s Solo Small Firm Internet Group (SFIG) for feedback.
• August - I started telling my callers about the site.
• October - My web address appeared in my Yellow Pages ad.
• November - Google search engine found my site.
• December - Other search engines began to find my site.
• Ongoing during 2002: Writing new articles periodically, ongoing tweaking of articles and code.

• Periodic major coding changes. See How I learned website building for more details on the development problems I faced.
• Ongoing - Writing new articles periodically, ongoing tweaking of articles and code.
• Ongoing - Growing popularity of site.
• February 2005 - Started the TimsLaw Blog, to rant and rave about social issues, politics, and civil rights, and to learn some PHP. My blog is a PHP-based Wordpress site, and provided a training ground for converting TimsLaw.com to Wordpress.
• March 2006 - Began re-coding TimsLaw.com into a PHP-based Wordpress site.

• Continue to work on new designs for the TimsLaw Front Page, such as developing a graphics banner for the masthead at the top of the page, to look slicker than the HTML tables I currently use.
• Building a database summarizing important and new employment law cases. (This might be more doable with a PHP-based site rather than an old fashioined HTML site).
• Build an online discussion forum for employment topics using one of the PHP-based packages available. I’ve been playing off and on with Xoops and PHPbb since about May 2005.
• Start a Blog ——- (Done)
• Convert TimsLaw.com to a PHP database site (working on it)