The Run of the City

It’s midnight, and Dwight Williams’ pager has just gone off.

He’s groggy and in his pajamas, but he can’t ignore the calls from reporters. Sleep will wait. It’s just another day in 1996 as deputy press secretary for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Williams always wanted to go into law; but after graduating from NYU, he rose from an intern in Giuliani’s office to a leader on the mayor’s communications team. The career path was put on hold. “Once you got sucked in, it was hard not to pursue that,” he says.

No two days were alike, Williams says of his three-year stint in the office, and no off day was truly off. When the Yankees won the World Series in 1996, he organized media coverage for the parade. When a reporter called with questions, Williams found answers. Giuliani kept a robust schedule, bouncing from press conference to public event and back again. “I can’t say how many days I spent playing with this portable podium we would set up,” Williams says with a laugh.

He loved it all. “We were young, we didn’t know what we were doing, but we really had the run of the city,” he says. “It was my best job—until now.”

Today, Williams is a family law attorney at Atlanta’s Kessler & Solomiany. He moved south for a job on Coca-Cola’s media relations team a month prior to 9/11. “I’m a Georgia guy now but I still bleed New York,” he says. “[September 11] was surreal, just the strangest day. To be so New York and then not be there that day.”

Williams made it back a month later. “I’ll never forget that smell of the pile—that electrical smell still burning,” he recalls. “And that view that you’re so used to seeing not being there anymore.”

He hasn’t spoken to Giuliani since 2001, but he’s followed along as his former boss continues to make headlines—especially in Georgia, where a judge ruled in October that Giuliani owes $146 million to two election workers he defamed.

Williams tries to square that with the prosecutor and mayor he once knew. “What he did on 9/11 was one of the most amazing leadership jobs anyone has done. The man went to hundreds of funerals,” Williams says. “It’s sad. This is not the way that someone should be spending their later years. I’m just disheartened because it tarnishes a bit of what we all did.”

The glamor of media relations eventually wore off for Williams. So as he and wife Michelle were starting a family, he attended law school. “Book in one hand, baby in another,” he says. “Just getting through.”

Graduating from Georgia State University’s College of Law in 2011, he started repping homeowners associations in collections and violations matters. It was enjoyable but straightforward. An association member can either paint their house pink or they can’t; there’s no middle ground. (And the answer is almost always: No, they can’t, Williams adds.)

Family law isn’t so black or white, pink or not pink. There are shades of gray with every case.

“I just enjoy helping people out at their worst time,” he says. “And more importantly, helping the kids in the middle of it.”

When he worked in communications, Williams always had to study the perspectives of all parties before making a statement. That ability to focus on the big picture, he says, helps him succeed as a lawyer. “I draw from it every day,” he says. “The PR work still happens: How is that email or text message going to be received? How is a judge, or spouse, or any third party, going to receive your message? … That part of the job came naturally to me.”