Whitney Wallace Williams was born and raised in Salisbury, North Carolina. After graduating high school from Salem Academy in Winston-Salem, Whitney attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and thereafter attended Wake Forest University School of Law, graduating in 2008 with a Juris Doctorate degree. During law school summers, Whitney clerked with the North Carolina Court of Appeals and New York City law firm, Lieff Cabraser. After graduation, Whitney returned to her hometown of Salisbury to practice law alongside her mother, Mona Lisa Wallace, and other talented colleagues at Wallace & Graham, seeking to make a difference in the lives of others through the legal system.
From her very first memory, Whitney has had an innate passion to help people, particularly those bullied or underprivileged. Whitney’s passion for the law and justice was largely shaped by observing her mother advocate for clients in their deepest times of need during the entirety of her formative years. Her humor, groundedness, positive disposition, and efforts towards work/life balance are a credit to her exceptional father, Lee Wallace, a third generation real estate developer and owner of Wallace Realty.
Since 2008, Whitney has practiced civil litigation and workers’ compensation, helping hundreds of clients achieve justice and peace of mind through the legal system. She has tried numerous cases before the North Carolina Industrial Commission, including wins on behalf of her client in the North Carolina Court of Appeals and Supreme Court. In 2019 and 2020, she was nominated alongside her litigation team, with the Trial Lawyer of the Year award by national nonprofit organization, Public Justice - winning the award in 2020, for the firm’s work on its environmental litigation case against Smithfield Foods. In 2020, she was invited by the North Carolina Industrial Commission to lecture at the Twenty-Sixth Annual North Carolina Workers’ Compensation Educational Conference.
Whitney is a member of the North Carolina State Bar, Rowan County Bar, Rowan County Bar Association (Past-President), American Association for Justice (AAJ), North Carolina Advocates for Justice (NCAJ), and the Public Justice Foundation (PJ). Outside of work, Whitney is deeply engaged with her community and nonprofit boards and is dedicated to making her small community of Salisbury and Rowan County the best that it can be. Since 2011, she has consistently served on boards, committees, and commissions, pursuing one passion project after another to improve the lives of local citizens. In 2021, Whitney was honored for her community leadership in the by the Salisbury Post in its piece, Spirit of Rowan. In 2022, Whitney was awarded the North Carolina Main Street Champion award for her advocacy on behalf of Downtown Salisbury.
Whitney is proudly married to U.S. Army Veteran and business owner, Brannon Williams, and mother to two daughters, Annie and Ella Williams, who attend Salisbury Academy.
The Williams family supports numerous local and statewide charities which align with their values of helping veterans, children, education, access to health care, poverty, Rowan-Salisbury arts, history, culture, and tourism, and the environment. In 2020, Williams created, launched, and continues to serve as chair for Wallace & Graham’s charitable arm, Wallace & Graham Gives, a program designed to engage W&G with its community through charitable giving. The program includes a committee comprised of W&G attorneys and legal professionals and donates $50,000.00 annually to the Rowan-County community, affecting change in the areas of veterans’ access to mental health treatment, education, senior living, poverty, literacy, the environment and sustainability, cancer prevention, and health care.
