EXCLUSIVE: She was once a local “woman of the year,” but now lawyer Kelly DuFord Williams is accused of stealing her clients’ funds, making fake 911 calls, and committing malpractice.
life,” Bryan Morgan, who worked as a paralegal at Slate Law Group, told The Daily Beast. “She always pretended she was the biggest, baddest of them all and she was only out for justice.”
Williams, who is currently ineligible to practice law in California, did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.According to Williams, her dreams of being a litigator started in the third grade after her family moved from Ireland. In 2017, Williams returned to San Diego and opened her first firm with DuFord to focus on business and employment law litigation. It lasted three years. She and DuFord separated in December 2019 and legally divorced two years later.In February 2020, just weeks before the coronavirus would paralyze the country, Williams closed DuFord Law and opened Whiteslate LLP, which did business as Slate Law Group.
Multiple, confusing Slack channels forced employees to “piece together” what Williams wanted, the former law intern noted. He said many of his peers were afraid of Williams. Known for her quick temper and lashing out, the former intern said that Williams once went as far as firing a paralegal over a firm-wide Slack channel.
“She would go through [billing documents] and say, ‘This isn’t enough time, you need to add more time,’” Morgan says. He says he too found some of his invoices had been altered in the company’s internal management system, and his hours increased.“She loved to spend money,” he said. “She used to sing that Cardi B song, ‘Money’. There’s one part in the song that goes [something like]: ‘There’s nothing in the world I like more than checks.
“I hope to be able to earn that money back at some point. But what upset me the most is the breach of trust,” Goens added. “With Kelly, I trusted her blindly.” Two months later, Williams was sued again—this time for failing to pay her rent on a three-bedroom townhouse just five minutes from the heart of the city’s Little Italy. The civil case says Williams did not pay rent from April to June 2020, and owed $9,870. The case was eventually dropped in August 2021.
Torices said it was around that time when Koparanova started calling the office asking for her money. She remembers after one of Koparanova’s emails, Williams told her to “let Anna know I just sent her the wire.”“Kelly would say she sent the wire and it would take a couple of days,” Torcies said. “Kelly always had an excuse. Honestly, her repeating ‘I sent the wire’ kind of reminded me of Anna Delvey.
During the seven-hour trip with Workman, her husband, and their 2-year-old daughter, Huerta said his phone received a constant stream of texts and phone calls from Williams. Huerta estimates he received “120 texts and at least 30 missed calls” from Williams by the time he arrived in Utah. In text messages reviewed by The Daily Beast, Williams berates Huerta in an attempt to get him to respond—starting with a simple breakup message.
Williams said in the first call that she “had a friend who needed a welfare check” because “they were having a panic attack.” She then falsely identified herself as “Amanda Mathis” and claimed that she was the “aunt of the daughter there” and that “they were freaking out about the daughter,” the state bar court’s
A few minutes into the conversation, Huerta showed his phone to the officers. Workman said the group then realized that Williams had made good on her threat to call the police. Among Williams’ incredible actions: she denied seven times she sent the text message barrage to Huerta, and separately repeatedly stated that she did not remember making the 911 calls or identifying herself as “Amanda Mathis. At one point, Williams even asked the court, “so my dating life is a thing now?”
Over the next month, Williams transferred at least $29,000 of the funds to other accounts, the investigation found, marking the transactions as “attorney fees,” and “expenses.” By November, Vaara had still not received any money and had been seeking answers from Williams for months. When she realized Williams was never going to give her the money, Vaara filed a complaint with the state bar, according to the court’s decision. Another client trying to get answers from Williams was Fernando Rodriguez, 68, who she had represented in a wrongful termination case against his former employer. Rodriguez was fired from his job as a manager at the Omni Hotel just before Christmas in 2018, after working for the company for 14 years.
“She always said: ‘The check is in the mail.’ It was never in the mail,” Rodriguez says. “She played so many games with me mentally.”Ultimately, Rodriguez says, he ended up with only $55,000 of the settlement. He still doesn’t know what happened to the additional $120,000.
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