About Me

William Mallory Kent graduated from Harvard College in 1975, with honors, and was first admitted to the bar in 1978 after graduating cum laude from the University of Florida College of Law. He also attended Ludwig Maximillians Universitaet, Munich, Germany 1972-1973 and Adam Mickiewvicz Universitaet, Poznan, Poland, 1978. He qualified at Harvard in both German, his major, and Arabic, as a second language. He was a Fellow of the Robert Bosch Foundation, Germany, in 1987.

Mr. Kent's early legal training was at Rogers & Wells, now known as Clifford Chance Rogers & Wells, an international law firm with over 2,000 lawyers, where he specialized in tax shelter investments, real estate transactions, finance and related general corporate matters. His practice has been devoted exclusively to criminal defense, however, since leaving Rogers & Wells in 1987.

Mr. Kent was an assistant federal public defender in Jacksonville, Florida from 1989 to 1999, a position in which he did both federal criminal trials and appeals. Mr. Kent had a number of notable trial victories against the United States Attorney's Office, winning four criminal trials back to back on one occasion. His trial successes including a wide variety of cases from white collar fraud to drug conspiracies. His appellate work as a federal defender won him broad notice including his success before the United States Supreme Court in Stinson v. United States, a federal sentencing guideline appeal which has been cited over 1,000 times by other courts and was cited in both Booker and Blakely, the dramatic new guideline caees.

Mr. Kent started his own boutique criminal defense firm focusing on federal criminal appeals, habeas corpus and sentencing, and Florida criminal appeals and post-conviction relief in 1999. He represents clients in federal appeals and habeas matters across the United States.