Tilton and Dunn, P.L.L.P.

TILTON & DUNN, P.L.L.P., is located in the heart of St. Paul, overlooking the mighty Mississippi River. This small law firm consistently provides excellent service to and on behalf of our clients.

While we may focus on serious personal injury claims, including wrongful death and medical malpractice matters, our practice also includes work in the areas of criminal defense, auto accidents, media relations, employment (e.g. sexual harassment; wrongful discharge), Wills & Trusts, real estate, and general litigation.

Over the years, members of the firm have tried cases involving medical negligence, wrongful death, auto accidents, murder, rape, kidnaping, drunk driving, defamation, wrongful discharge, property line disputes, products liability, and much more.

Because we carefully select our clients and cases, most of our clients’ claims, including major personal injury claims, have been settled without trial. Most of those have been settled upon confidential terms.

BILL TILTON'S BIOGRAPHY

Bill Tilton has been a Minnesota lawyer since graduating from the University of Minnesota Law School with a J.D. in 1977. In over three decades of practice, he has obtained many superlative settlements and verdicts for his clients, with record results in several categories. His practice focuses on personal injury and wrongful death matters, particularly medical malpractice. He also has represented medical professionals in their personal affairs. Although Bill prefers dialogue over confrontation and settlement over trials, he has been lead counsel in jury trials in many categories, including major cases involving medical malpractice, auto accidents, products liability, murder, kidnaping, wrongful discharge, defamation, prison riot, and more.

Bill is certified by the Minnesota State Bar Association as a Certified Trial Specialist. He received the “Minnesota Lawyer Attorneys of the Year” from Minnesota Lawyer newspaper in 2001. http://www.minnlawyer.com He has been named a Minnesota Super Lawyer for many years by Minnesota Lawyer. He has long been listed in Who’s Who in Personal Injury Law, published by Minnesota Law & Politics. http://www.lawandpolitics.com/minnesota . Bill’s firm has long been “AV-rated,” the highest rating available, per Martindale Hubbell Law Directory.

For over two decades, Bill has served as a volunteer attorney for Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services (http://www.smrls.org), providing pro bono representation for qualified indigent persons. For years, he has been a member of the SMRLS Campaign for Legal Aid Fundraising Committee. During the 2009 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, Bill and his partner, George Dunn, provided free legal representation for reporters and for the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press (http://www.rcfp.org) on behalf of members of the media who were subject to police arrest during the convention.

Bill is a former adjunct professor of law at William Mitchell College of Law. He has helped educate other legal professionals by speaking at many continuing legal education seminars over the years.

Examples of news coverage of a couple of representative clients can be found in the following two City Pages articles: “The Silent Treatment” http://www.citypages.com/2001-01-31/news/the-silent-treatment and “Til Death” http://www.citypages.com/2003-07-09/news/til-death.

Also of interest might be an article that appeared in the Pioneer Press, “Parallel Bars: Twin Cities Legal Eagles Could Easily Fill the Roles of TV’s Popular Law Firm Shows, ‘Ally McBeal’ and ‘The Practice,’” St. Paul Pioneer Press, November 30, 1999. As the article notes, this was at the time when the leading legal show on television show was “The Practice,” starring Dylan McDermott in the character of Bobby Donnell, the founder and senior partner of the law firm featured on the program. The Pioneer Press assembled a panel who picked those members of the Minnesota legal community who, in their opinion, were most similar to Bobby Donnell and the other characters on “The Practice” television program. That panel, which included reporters, Appellate and Supreme Court judges and active lawyers, chose Bill Tilton as the Minnesota lawyer most similar to Bobby Donnell, the senior partner of the firm in “The Practice.”

Bill is admitted to practice in the State of Minnesota, State of Wisconsin, U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, and has also practiced in the Western District of the U.S. District Court of Montana. He is a member of the American Bar Association, the American Association for Justice, the Minnesota State Bar Association, the Minnesota Association for Justice, the Ramsey County Bar Association, the Academy of Certified Trial Lawyers of Minnesota, the Wisconsin Bar Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild, the Drug Policy Alliance, the NAACP, the Southern Poverty Law Center, American Whitewater, Minnesota Historical Society, Amnesty International, the Center for Science of the Public Interest, Greenpeace, Minnesota Public Radio, and many additional worthy organizations.

For several years, Bill has endowed the Tilton Human Rights Fellowship given by and through the University of Minnesota Human Rights Center. http://www.hrusa.org . For fifteen years previously, he endowed the Tilton Scholarship at Wolverine Human Services in Detroit, Michigan, a program dealing with abused, neglected, and delinquent boys in the State of Michigan. http://www.wolverinehs.org/

Bill was one of the founders of and for three years was Chair of the Board of Directors of the East Side Neighborhood Development Corporation, a multi-service neighborhood revitalization program on the east side of St. Paul. http://www.esndc.org . Bill is also a founder and Chair of the Mississippi Whitewater Park Development Corporation. http://www.whitewaterpark.canoe-kayak.org . This is a citizen-advocacy group which succeeded in raising millions of dollars towards planning for (but, unfortunately, not yet construction of) restored rapids suitable for whitewater rafting and kayaking at St. Anthony Falls in downtown Minneapolis.

Bill Tilton is a St. Paul native. Before becoming a lawyer, he was proud to have been part of the core social movements of the late 60s and early 70s, including civil rights organizing, the student power movement, the Woodstock festival, the first Earth Day, Hundred Flowers alternative newspaper, and more. He was a part of anti-Vietnam War leadership, including being the Co-Chair of the Minnesota Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, while also acting as Vice President of the Minnesota Student Association; student government at the University of Minnesota, while also being a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity. Bill found inordinate visibility in 1970 when became one of the Minnesota 8 draft board raiders, a group which had intended to feed Selective Service records to the Mississippi River. He was convicted of “attempted interference with the Selective Service System” and sentenced to five years imprisonment, of which he did just over 20 months in federal prison. During that time period, he even got his picture in Rolling Stone magazine a couple of times (but not the cover). See Rolling Stone, March 16, 1972. After his release, for some time Bill was a part of the community support team for the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee. Then he went to law school at the University of Minnesota, where he served a year as editor of Quare, the law school newspaper. In 1977, he apparently became the first felon to be admitted to practice law in the State of Minnesota.

Early in his legal career, Bill also worked in radio. For several years he produced for Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) a series of programs entitled, “The Role of the Courts in a Changing Society.” For that work, Bill won two national awards for MPR, the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award and the Ohio State Broadcasting Award. Bill also for a number of years hosted KQ Scope, a listener call-in public affairs talk show which took place on Sunday nights on KQRS radio.

Bill has always had a special interest in international and comparative law. He studied for a term of law school with the law faculty at the University of Ghana at Legon, near Accra, Republic of Ghana, West Africa. Since becoming a lawyer, Bill has been a part of special lawyer/judge delegations/study groups to China and Cuba, and will be a part of a similar legal delegation sponsored by People to People International to Israel in November 2009.

Bill has visited over 50 countries. He has hitchhiked across the Sahara Desert; summitted Mount Kilimanjaro; gotten lost on the Inca Trail; paddled whitewater rivers on several continents, including the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon and the Upper Yangtze River in Tibet; survived cancer; coached grade school girls’ softball for IHM-St. Luke’s School; in the summer of 2007 spent weeks kayaking along the uninhabited arctic coast of northeast Greenland; learned to meditate; and more.

Additionally, and most importantly, Bill has helped raise three strong daughters.

Bill looks forward to many more years of helping people through the practice of law.

Please Call: 651-224-7687

St Paul MN Personal Injury Lawyer