William Graham, a lawyer and son of former Washington Post publisher Katharine “Kay” Graham, died on Dec. 20 in Los Angeles from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The Washington Post broke the news of Graham's death shortly before Christmas. Before moving into business and pursuing various philanthropic endeavors, William Graham began his career at Williams & Connolly, where he spent three years at the high-powered, Washington, D.C.-based firm after graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law in 1973.

Williams & Connolly chairman Dane Butswinkas issued a statement expressing the Am Law 100 firm's condolences upon hearing of Graham's death.

“We were so sorry to hear about the tragic passing of William Graham,” Butswinkas said. “We are saddened to have lost a member of the extended Williams & Connolly family. The world has lost a wonderful and gifted person and a great philanthropist. We send our deepest sympathies to the Graham family.”

The Washington Post has been a longtime client of Williams & Connolly. The firm represented the newspaper's former parent company and Graham's brother—former Washington Post Co. chairman and CEO Donald Graham—in beating back and eventually defeating a securities class action suit in 2013 over its education unit Kaplan Inc.

Williams & Connolly also took the lead for stereo technology pioneer Sidney Harman on his $1 purchase of Newsweek magazine in 2010 from the Washington Post Co., a deal that saw the storied publication merge with The Daily Beast, a website owned by media mogul Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp. Harman died the following year at 92 and Diller assumed control of Newsweek, which was sold again in August 2013 to International Business Times Media.

That same month, Amazon.com Inc. founder and billionaire Jeffrey Bezos turned to Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton to advise on his $250 million acquisition of The Washington Post from the Washington Post Co., which was advised on that deal by Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Goodwin Procter.

Graham was not the only member of his family to work at Williams & Connolly. In 2008, Katharine Weymouth, a granddaughter of Graham's mother, Kay Graham, was named media chief and publisher of The Washington Post. Weymouth served as an associate at Williams & Connolly before becoming an in-house lawyer and head of advertising for the newspaper, which she left in September 2014 after its purchase by Bezos.

William Graham himself had reportedly been suffering in recent years from a heart ailment. He taught trial law at UCLA's law school for a few years, but has not been an active member of the bar in California since 1983, according to public records. Philip Graham, his late father, also committed suicide in 1963 at 48 after spending six weeks in a psychiatric hospital.

Surviving William Graham are his wife and two children, as well as his brothers Donald and Stephen Graham, and a sister, Lally Weymouth, the latter a longtime Newsweek correspondent who still serves as a senior associate editor at The Washington Post. William Graham spent most summers at a home he inherited in West Tisbury, Massachusetts.

The 218-acre Mohu property was bought for $1.4 million by Kay Graham in 1972 on the exclusive island enclave of Martha's Vineyard. For decades, the estate hosted members of the media and political establishment. Kay Graham died at 84 in 2001, the same year that William Graham dissolved Graham Partners, a Los Angeles-based investment firm that he ran for nearly 20 years.

On Jan. 12, a major motion picture called “The Post” will hit theaters nationwide. The film chronicles The Washington Post's reporting on the Pentagon Papers, documents that detailed the U.S. government's decades of disastrous policies in Vietnam. Williams & Connolly's ties to the newspaper are detailed in “The Man to See,” a 1992 book about Williams & Connolly founding partner and legendary trial lawyer Edward Bennett Williams. (Williams died in 1988, 10 years after the death of fellow name partner Paul Connolly.)

The book, written by Evan Thomas, noted how Williams advised Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee to push back against the newspaper's other lawyers and management as they sought to quash reporting on the Pentagon Papers. Bradlee reiterated Williams' counsel to Kay Graham, who encouraged him to proceed with publication.

CORRECTION: 12/28/17, 12:51 p.m. EST. A previous version of this story misstated the year that Edward Bennett Williams died. We regret the error.