Big Changes For This Bankruptcy Lawyer

I’ve been a Seattle bankruptcy lawyer for almost six years now, and it’s time for a change.   It won’t be a little change, it’s going to be a big change.  How big?  Well my wife and I are moving to Louisville, KY.  It’s where she’s from.  When we get to Louisville, I won’t practice law.   The law practice will be 95% closed by June 1 and 100% closed by July 20.
Why am I going to stop practicing law, considering that I did three years of law school, clerked for a federal judge, and ran my own practice?  The short answer is that all lawyer jokes are true.
So what  am I going to do instead?  Web developer, but only because professional basketball player is out of reach.  I’m barely six feet.  My ball handling skills are weak at best, and I’ve got a torn meniscus.   Also, the best thing I’ve gotten from running my own law practice is an undiscovered love of all things web technology related.
Here’s the deal.  When I started this practice, I was broke, broke, broke.  I looked around for a web developer.  I paid way too much money for a below average WordPress site.  It didn’t do any of the things I wanted it to do.  It barely ranked on Google.  I was stuck.
Being a resourceful guy and really needing to keep my law practice afloat, I taught myself WordPress.  I built a site that was better than the one I had paid for.  Then I taught myself SEO.  After a few months, Google started being good to me, and my practice took off.
I still maintained my site.  In fact, my wife (the smart one in this marriage) pointed out that I talked about my website even more than I talked about how much I disliked practicing law.
Then I made one big mistake.  About a year ago, my practice was insanely busy.  My site was getting to be a pain to manage.  This time I thought, “Gee, I’ve got the money to hire a really bang up web designer.”  So I did.  You do not get what you pay for.  Instead you spend three months asking your web developer why the site doesn’t work.  You actually tell your web developer a few things that he should have known.  Then your web developer launches your new site for you, without mentioning that he’d completely changed the internal link structure.  The web developer will not be spoken of again.
The site you see today was the site that I paid for.  I made several changes.  I spent an entire afternoon doing 301 redirects to mitigate the SEO damage from the completely new – and unasked for – internal link structure.  That was it.  I decided never again.  This time I meant it.
I haven’t redone the site from the ground up, because it’s my law practice’s site and isn’t meant to be a portfolio.  Also, I’m closing the practice, moving across the country, taking care of a 9 month old, teaching myself to code, and scrounging up the time to hang out with my wife.
After all that, I realized something.  I love messing around with websites.  I’ve been messing around with WordPress sites for years.  So I decided to do something about it.  By then, I knew enough HTML/CSS to get myself into and then out of trouble.  I know a smidgen of PHP.  So I decided to embark on a formal self study of coding.   I made it through HTML and CSS in a couple of weeks, while working full time and taking care of my 9 month old daughter.  Sleep is for the weak.  Now I’m working on JavaScript.  Once that’s done, it’s on to PHP.
Right now, at this very moment, I’m looking for opportunities to get my foot into the web development world.   I’m looking for opportunities to learn new skills, polish the skills that I already have, build a portfolio of work, and find a new gig where I can bang on computers all day.
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