A dim, warm-lit living room: a couch, a bright table lamp, a lit candle, and a laptop open on a low table, with a man seated at the laptop.

About this demonstration

Nobody at this firm is real. The person who built it is.

Thoreson & Vance is a fictional law firm, built as a live demonstration. It exists so a real practice can see what a real site looks like before commissioning one — the words on the screen, the photographs, the type, the way the page moves as you scroll.

A three-story quartzite building with arched windows and carved stone dates, seen through a wrought-iron garden arch in front of its entrance.
This is not the courthouse, and not a law office. It is the Sioux Falls high school building, dated 1900 and 1906 in the stone. It is here because it is the same quartzite, and because a firm that says it knows this town ought to be able to prove it knows more than one building.

What's real

The location. The building on the front page is the Old Minnehaha County Courthouse, downtown.

The law. The South Dakota Codified Laws cited through the probate walkthrough are real citations.

The photographs. Every one was taken here, on location, in August. No stock photographs, no hired actors in suits, no template.

Then we tried to photograph statues

Sioux Falls has monuments, and a monument seemed like an honest stand-in — a real thing, in a real place, holding a space where a person will go. So we checked whether we were allowed to.

We were not, and the reason is worth knowing. US copyright law lets you photograph a building from the street and use the picture commercially. That exemption covers architecture and nothing else — sculpture gets none of it. Most of the monuments here are recent enough to still be protected, including several where the person depicted died a hundred years ago. It is the statue's age that matters, not the subject's.

So that idea died, and it died from research rather than from a hunch. That is the part worth paying for.

Who built this

My name is Kelly. I am not a lawyer — I build websites, here in Sioux Falls, and this is one of them.

It is written by hand. No page builder, no framework, nothing assembled out of somebody else's parts. That matters less as a point of pride than as arithmetic: this page makes six requests, and so does every other page on this site. Every one of them goes to the server it sits on. Nothing here reports back — no analytics, no tag manager, no advertising network sitting quietly in the corner while a stranger reads about what happens when a parent dies.

And the files are yours. Not licensed to you, not parked somewhere that keeps them if you leave. Yours, the way a filing cabinet is yours. Stop working with me tomorrow and you still have a website that works on Monday.

The photographs

No studio. Photographed at home in Sioux Falls, late at night, with a laptop, a camera on a stack of books, a self-timer, and two lamps — the second deliberately muted at about forty-five degrees, for depth. Real work, made by hand, at home.

A man with dark hair and glasses sits on a couch, hands clasped, smiling toward the camera in warm, dim lamplight.
Photographed at home at eleven at night, on a self-timer, with the camera on a stack of books. Two lights, the second deliberately muted.
The same man in profile, hand resting near his chin, looking at a laptop screen on the same couch.
The same evening. This is what the work actually looks like.
A dim, warm-lit living room: a couch, a bright table lamp, a lit candle, and a laptop open on a low table, with a man seated at the laptop.
Not a studio. A living room in Sioux Falls, a laptop, and a lamp that kept winning.

Your photograph goes here.
Taken properly. In daylight. By somebody you hired, who does this for a living.