Billie Little was raised in Ohio in a household of four siblings and, in the course of her childhood, 22 foster children. Her parents had a strong sense of civic duty. Hers was a religious family; they went to church three times a week. She was 7 when her father, spotting a KKK meeting in town, gathered a group to run the hooded men off. At 15, she did missionary work in Harlan County, handing out clothes and canned food. At 18, she became an itinerant laborer, waiting tables, pumping gas, painting houses, and picking apples across the West. “I worked alongside many immigrants and saw how hard they work. I respected them a lot. There was nothing but kindness.”
Along the way, she joined a commune, married, and got a college degree. She endured domestic violence, raised two children while putting herself through law school. She worked in legal publishing for 21 years at Thomson, later Thomson Reuters. In September 2025, Billie became a senior legal editor at the company. “I finally got the promotion I’d dreamed of. Finally. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to worry about money. I started thinking about buying a house.”
In 2007, Thomson, known for its legal publications, purchased Reuters, the venerable international reporting service. The company grew into a giant data broker and media conglomerate that, besides running Reuters, sells massive quantities of personal data to private industry and government agencies.
Thomson Reuters (TR) is based in Toronto, Canada. One of its US offices, home to more than 3,600 employees, is in Eagan, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis.
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