About Robert B. McCaw

Born in Durham, NC, Robert B. McCaw grew up in a military family that, from his earliest memories, traveled the world, living in Panama, Japan, and Germany, as well as various places in the United States. In his travels, McCaw attended twelve different schools before enrolling in Georgetown University, where he earned a BS in Mathematics. Ambivalent about a career in math and inspired by his father’s service as a military lawyer, he joined the army as a second lieutenant, where he underwent artillery training, jumped out of airplanes, and spent 13 months at Camp Page in post-war Korea. Assigned by his camp commander to serve as a prosecutor in a special court-martial, he tried and won his first case and became hooked on the law. After leaving the army, he graduated from law school at the University of Virginia, where he became editor-in-chief of the Virginia Law Review.

Legal Career

Upon graduation from UVA law school, he served as a law clerk for US Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black before joining the Washington, DC, law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. In 1999, McCaw moved from Washington, DC, to New York to open the firm’s New York Office, which grew rapidly before Wilmer merged with Hale and Dorr in 2004.

McCaw practiced law in Washington and New York for nearly 40 years, watching and often representing notable figures in the numerous political and financial controversies that have swept across the national stage, including those dealing with Watergate era political contributions, exports of military equipment to Libya, the Boesky-Drexel scandal and other insider trading prosecutions, the dot.com bubble of the 1990s, the 2002 Wall Street analyst bias cases, the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, and multiple government money-laundering investigations. Many of these cases also had international elements, leading as well to his interactions with officials around the world. Over the course of his varied legal career, he also worked closely – sometimes cooperatively and other times adversarially – with many state and federal government agencies.

The Author’s Inspiration

Fluency with the intricacies of the law, due in part to the panoply of his long and varied legal career, has provided McCaw a rich tapestry from which to draw inspiration as an author. Clients, partners, investigators, judges, co-counsel, adversaries, and witnesses — all provided him 40 years’ worth of education, emotion, humor, pathos, and joy from con artists to dedicated public servants, from the timid to the overly aggressive, from the humblest to the most self-congratulatory, from lying scoundrels to honest witnesses. McCaw’s practice has offered up an endless supply of characters for a novelist.

Writing Traitors

McCaw’s experience and background in Washington and New York, working on domestic and international cases, prompted him to write a fictional story about the international, political, and legal scene in Washington, particularly at a time when democracy is being tested at home and abroad. That interest, combined with an innate love of suspense novels, detective stories, puzzles, intricate storylines, and fascination with political scandals, led him to write Traitors. Featuring a DOJ lawyer as the protagonist, Traitors is both an espionage novel and a legal thriller.

McCaw now lives and writes in NYC and California with his wife, Calli, an accomplished fine art photographer and valuable collaborator.