Bill is a native of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  He attended the University of Virginia (Charlottesville), earning a bachelor’s degree in commerce with a concentration in Finance.  Bill was awarded the Wall Street Journal Outstanding Student Award for the highest grade point average in Finance.  After graduating from Stetson University College of Law, Bill began his career in 1975 as a lawyer practicing in Broward County, Florida, in a broad field of law, including real estate law, probate and trust litigation, architectural law, and commercial litigation. 

The prestigious Martindale Hubbell organization has awarded Bill its highest “AV” rating for each of the last twenty consecutive years, “a testament that his peers rank him at the highest level of professional excellence, while also maintaining the highest  level  of ethical conduct.” In 2007, Bill published “Florida’s Big Dig,” the story of the financing and construction of Florida’s Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway and the laying out and sale and transfer of a million acres of public land in towns, villages, and settlements throughout southeast Florida earned from the State of Florida in constructing the waterway. This publication earned Bill the Rembert Patrick Prize for the Best Scholarly Book on a Florida history topic by the Florida Historical Society in 2008.

In recent years, Bill has devoted significant time in consulting with other lawyers and professionals such as engineers, architects, and planners about the financing and construction beginning in 1881 of what would become the public, federally controlled Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway in 1929, with a litany of rights and obligations accorded private citizens, federal, state, and local governments as well as local, state, and federal agencies with jurisdiction over the Intracoastal Waterway as well as navigable rivers and streams as of March 3, 1845 and wherever private lands abut navigable bodies of water.