Founding partner of Schulte Roth & Zabel and head of the Individual Client Services Group. Practices in the areas of estate planning, wills, trusts, charitable foundations, income- and gift-tax planning, estate administration and family law.

Bill represents many of the wealthiest individuals in the country on tax planning; succession planning; charitable giving (through the use of private foundations, public charities, split-interest trusts and direct giving); estates and trusts, including representation of individuals and institutions acting as fiduciaries with respect to both general administrative matters and litigated or contested ones; and family law matters, including prenuptial, postnuptial and cohabitation agreements, and the negotiation or mediation of substantial divorce matters. Negotiated a $7.2 billion settlement with the federal government in the Madoff case in one of the largest civil forfeiture cases in US history.

Bill is a member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations, a Fellow of Brandeis University, the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel and the American Bar Foundation, and an Academician of the International Academy of Estate and Trust Law.

For more than 50 years, Bill has been an advocate for social justice in the United States and abroad. His civic and philanthropic activities have included, among many others:

• Authoring the lead brief on behalf of the ACLU in Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage
• Investigating the cases of those who disappeared in Chile during General Augusto Pinochet’s “Dirty War”

He has served as:

• Chair of Human Rights First for over 20 years
• Chair of Immigrant Justice Corps
• Trustee or director of New York University, The New School, Mailman School of Public Health, The JPB Foundation (vice chairman), The Lymphoma Foundation
• Chair of the Princeton University Planned Giving Committee, Sakharov Archives, Lincoln Center Theater and The Academy of American Poets

In 2006, Bill received a Lifetime Achievement Award from The American Lawyer, and has also been honored with the Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Human Rights Award, Brandeis University Distinguished Community Service Award, Distinguished Service Award (conferred by The New School), the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights Extraordinary Leader Award, the Champion for Change Award from the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Center for Elder Abuse Prevention and the inaugural Robert F. Kennedy Justice Prize from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

In 2016, Bill established the William D. Zabel ‘61 Professorship in Human Rights at Harvard Law School to further his commitment to protecting the rights of others and to inspire future generations in the cause of human rights. In 2023, he established the William D. Zabel ’58 Professorship in Human Rights at Princeton University.