Sigrid McCawley Won’t Back Down

Sep 03, 2025 by admin

Photography by Jason Nuttle

Sigrid McCawley’s name has become synonymous with some of the most high-profile legal battles of our time. Her face is a constant presence on major news outlets—from Netflix documentaries (Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich) to interviews with 60 Minutes, ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN. As one of the key figures fighting for justice on behalf of Epstein’s victims, she has navigated the complexities of some of the most challenging and public legal cases in recent history.

A Managing Partner at Boies Schiller Flexner, a firm founded by famed lawyer David Boies and regarded as elite among litigation firms, McCawley’s skill as a litigator has earned her prestigious accolades, including Forbes 2025 America’s Best-In-State Lawyers and a spot on their Top 200 list in 2024. The American Lawyer named her Litigator of the Year in 2020, and National Law Journal recognized her as a Litigation Trailblazer in 2019. Forbes once described her courtroom work as “ironclad interrogation skills” and “a legal performance that should be taught.”

But beyond the headlines and high-stakes trials is a fuller portrait of McCawley—the mother, mentor, and community leader whose work has not only recovered hundreds of millions for survivors but continues to shape the legal landscape in lasting ways. This is the side that blends courtroom victories with boardroom leadership, family milestones, and the quiet moments that keep her grounded.

When I arrive at her Mediterranean-style Fort Lauderdale home, she greets me with a warm smile. At 5’10”, she has the posture of someone who’s spent decades commanding courtrooms, yet her manner is relaxed. The McCawleys have called this house their sanctuary for 16 years—close enough to the courthouse, airport, and their respective offices on Las Olas to balance the demands of a heavy caseload with a bustling family life.

That life includes four kids: Kincaid, 20; twin sons Max and Zac, 16; and Maddy, 11. Between school, sports, and travel, “free time” is more of a concept than a reality. Dan McCawley, a commercial real estate attorney, coaches their kids’ teams—basketball, football, baseball, even Maddy’s soccer. “It was love at first sight,” Dan says of meeting Sigrid at a friend’s World Series watch party in 1997. “I told my mom the next day I’d met the girl I wanted to marry.” After two years in Washington, D.C., they returned to Fort Lauderdale—Dan’s hometown—because “it’s where I knew we’d be better off raising a family.”

Sigrid’s work ethic was forged long before she ever stepped into a courtroom. Born in upstate New York, she moved with her mother, Jean Pasker, and two older sisters to Naples when she was entering the sixth grade. Jean raised the girls on her own, often working three jobs to keep them afloat. “That’s where I get it from,” McCawley says of her mother’s relentless drive. “She just didn’t stop—ever.” It’s a lesson she’s carried into her career: the willingness to keep showing up, no matter how hard the fight.

That same drive has fueled her rise in a profession where the bar for women is often set higher. “Most of the time, women have to try twice as hard as their male counterparts—and that’s still true today,” she says. But she also sees signs of progress for the next generation. “The men I work with now are much more understanding of women. You see more real partnerships in relationships than you did 20 years ago.”

Even so, the landscape of Big Law remains challenging. “A lot of women don’t end up staying in it,” says McCawley. “They might go in-house or take a different path. There are only a few of us in management at big firms, and I think it’s because of the barriers you face.” Breaking through meant proving her value beyond question. “Bringing in business is what gets you elevated in a firm,” she says. “I had to find a way to navigate that and stay with it.”

She’s quick to challenge the lawyer stereotype. “A client will say, ‘I want a pit bull.’ And I’ll tell them, ‘You actually don’t. You want someone who’s strategic, who will pick the right moments to be tough, because if you’re a pit bull all the time, you lose your impact.’ You can be calm, you can be measured—and still be formidable. The way you change that perception is by winning.”

That strategic mindset will be on full display this September, when McCawley and her partner, Kenya Davis go to trial in the Southern District of New York—Drew Dixon’s case against music executive LA Reid—where they’ll call high-profile witnesses, including John Legend, to the stand. In the days preceding her three-week trial in federal court—when most lawyers would be home preparing for trial—she’ll be in Washington, D.C., standing shoulder to shoulder with survivors at a World Without Exploitation rally, a public response to news that Ghislaine Maxwell could receive a reduced sentence or even a pardon. 

“She walks what she talks,” says Dawn Schneider, founder of Schneider Group Media and McCawley’s longtime advisor. “And I think that is one of the reasons for her success and why people are drawn to her and admire her.”

 Sigrid’s day to day work involves a lot of sophisticated litigation including shuffling from working to assist her energy clients with commercial disputes to handling multi-million dollar corporate buy out disputes. Her caseload is filled with matters that have drawn national attention. She is representing a group of professional dancers in a sexual abuse case involving a former dance instructor and his wife—work she describes as ‘being an important example of her firm’s commitment to free legal work for those in need’. “We just had a hearing last week on summary judgment,” she says, “and I expect that that case will get set for trial soon.” 

In the recent Lively v. Baldoni matter, she defended Blake Lively’s longtime publicist, Leslie Sloane and her company Vision PR, in a defamation suit brought by actor Justin Baldoni and successfully got her client dismissed from the litigation.  The public battle over that case “has taken away from what is really at the core—a woman who contends that she was harmed in the workplace and is rightfully standing up for herself.”  It’s survivor-centered work that defines much of her career. Her long-running representation of Virginia Giuffre and other women abused by Epstein remains one of her most high-profile—and personal—missions. “In the Epstein space, I have a very large class action right now, still pending in the Southern District of New York, where we have sued, on behalf of the survivors, Epstein’s right-hand lawyer and accountant—two of the centerpieces of his operation,” she explains. “Because it takes a lawyer to be able to create those false companies and document that information, and it takes an accountant to handle the money.”

In 2023, her team secured $365 million in settlements from JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank, using a novel legal theory, McCawley describes the settlements as “really life-changing money for those women.” But she’s not done. She continues to push for the unsealing of thousands of pages of court records known as the “Epstein files.” “People deserve to know who was there, why they were there, when they were involved,” she says. “There’s no reason just because you have money that you should be protected when you’ve done bad things.”

She recalls the time after Epstein died, when Judge Richard Berman allowed the survivors to speak openly in court. “Virginia was there, and many of the other survivors. You got to see that collective support from one another. They all came from different walks of life, abused at different times, and to see that sisterhood of survivorship—it was beautiful. It made me feel like, okay, there’s hope for these women. We got them some financial justice, which helps. It’s not perfect, but it can help alleviate the burden and get them good mental health care.”

Virginia’s untimely passing this year underscores the emotional toll these cases take on survivors. “From a trauma perspective, when you are ready to come to terms with that, it can affect you in many ways that you might not even realize…the scars of that abuse don’t go away. Facing those demons can be really difficult, and it doesn’t happen right away—it can resurface at different trigger points for different people,” McCawley says.

She also knows the system isn’t built to accommodate every survivor’s timeline. That’s why she’s fighting to abolish or extend the statute of limitations for adult survivors under the Federal Trafficking Act. “That argument to protect defendants just isn’t there anymore,” she says. “In the digital age, evidence doesn’t just disappear. We can go back years and prove cases. The law just hasn’t caught up.”

And she’s seen firsthand what it takes to prove even the most heavily denied claims. “When Virginia first came out and said, ‘These things happened to me…,’ everyone said, ‘You’re lying.’ We got really lucky because there were hard copy documents that helped us. As a child, she was being put on these private planes, and they had to record her name. We were able to place her there, get a photo of her in that location. That’s how we proved it.”

Her caseload is heavy, but so is the demand for her help. She gets calls every day from people hoping she’ll take their case. McCawley takes on as many as she can, but the reality is that a large portion have to be turned down.  “If I can’t take it, I’ll find them someone who will”, she says. 

Her advocacy extends well beyond the courtroom. McCawley sits on the boards of the Broward Community Foundation and Jack and Jill Center, and she previously served for years on the board of ChildNet. She mentors young lawyers on finding purpose-driven work and devotes substantial pro bono hours to cases that might otherwise never be brought to light. “It’s encouraging to see more large commercial firms stepping in and doing pro bono work,” she says. “It’s critical for access to justice.” 

Dan says it’s her ability to combine legal strategy with human empathy that makes her so effective. “Only Sigrid has clients who tell her they love her,” he says. “Not a lot of lawyers hear ‘I love you’ from their clients. She cares to a fault.”

It’s a sentiment she carries into every case. For McCawley, justice isn’t only about the verdict—it’s about the people. “I’ve seen the worst of humanity, but I’ve also seen the absolute best,” she says. “The survivors I’ve had the privilege of working with have changed me. They’ve given me hope—to survive those atrocities and still move forward, still fight, still live. That’s what keeps me going. It’s only made me a better person.”

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