Robert H. Traurig: the land lawyer

South Florida CEO,  Oct, 2004  by William Plasencia

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It was Aug. 1945 when a young sailor named Robert H. Traurig heard word over his military radio that Japanese troops had agreed to surrender, calling a close to World War II. The news nearly killed him.

Traurig, a US Navy communications operator stationed in western China, had just settled into his mosquito netting-swathed cot after a particularly taxing night of enciphering weather reports for transmission to Allied troops to the east. Nearby, some fellow soldiers celebrated news of the surrender by lighting firecrackers. "I was lying there in bed and the mosquito netting caught fire from some of the flaming debris. The closest I ever came to injury during the war was that morning of victory."

The young Traurig escaped the conflagration unscathed but would later in life put himself in the line of fire repeatedly as Miami-Dade County's preeminent real estate attorney during a time of massive expansion in the region following the end of the war. Traurig in some way influenced nearly every significant land use case in the county, say many friends, colleagues and competitors.

He launched his own law firm in 1954, and in 1967 co-founded Greenberg Traurig PA with attorney Melvin N. Greenberg. Over the years it would become South Florida's largest firm, specializing in land use and real estate issues that at times were as contentious as they were crucial to the development of Miami and other South Florida cities. Like his fellow "Legend" and classmate Donald C. McClosky. Traurig was a child of the Great Depression, and his experiences in South Florida during its formative period helped shape his later professional success.

He was 14 years old in 1939, when financial concerns convinced his parents to move the family from their hometown of Waterbury. Conn., to Miami--a small town at the time. As the family motor coach drove down Biscayne Boulevard, then, as now, a main artery of the city, Traurig saw miles of towering royal palm trees that lined the street. "I thought it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. I still do," he says.

The family settled in Miami, and Traurig went on to attend Miami Senior High School. There he met classmates Bill Graham (one of Florida Sen. Bob Graham's two older brothers), Pulitzer Prize winning poet Donald Justice and Miami attorney and civic leader Bill Colson. By 1943, Traurig had enlisted in the Navy and was sent to the University of Miami to study communications and, later, to midshipman school at Harvard University. His tour of duty in Asia included the liberation of Shanghai, China, whose European character and commercial influence had been preserved to a large extent by its Japanese occupiers. Unworldly and unsophisticated at that time, Traurig says he matured because of his experiences in the military.

The outbreak of the Korean Conflict pulled Traurig back into the Navy, but by 1953 he was discharged and married a Virginia woman. The two settled in Miami, and after a year working at another law firm, Traurig hung his own shingle out on an office in the Alfred I. Dupont building on East Flagler Drive in Miami. "Gradually my practice grew," he says. "Initially, like Don [McClosky]. I took anything that came through the door--mostly it was real estate because I knew people who worked in the building industry."

Miami during the 1950s was still a small town, but the competition for legal work was intense. "I was very lucky to have enough work to be a sole practitioner," he says. Several local mortgage companies sent an abundant amount of work his way and nudged him down the path of specializing in land use and real estate law. Moreover, Traurig had good role models to base the business on. His two uncles were successful real estate attorneys and Traurig knew from a very early age that he wanted to practice law. "They were outstanding lawyers, well-educated, and even though it was in a small environment, they excelled," he says.

"I was, in my own mind, unsuited to be a litigator, so I was happy to have an office [transactional] practice," he says. "I didn't like the advocacy aspect of litigation, I didn't like pleading and I didn't like the fact that there was a winner and a loser. Transactional law fit my personality better" because it was cut and dry with a predictable outcome.

Not that the outcome of Traurig's casework and professional career was predictable. It was not until the 1960s that his firm started taking on land use clients. One of the first was a single-family home developer whose buyers opposed the construction of a nearby supermarket in the south Miami area where Baptist Hospital had just been built. "I was comfortable in representing him, and we were successful. It ultimately became the principal work that I engaged in. I was still a real estate lawyer, but from that point on I had more and more opportunities to represent people before public [government] bodies," he says.