Chad McLain’s path to law had nothing to do with law school ambitions. He grew up in a small South Carolina town playing football and baseball, pitched at Wofford College well enough to land in the school’s athletic hall of fame, and after graduating went to work as a high school teacher and baseball coach. Law came later, and it came for a reason he didn’t choose.
A Small-Town Athlete at Wofford College
McLain was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and grew up excelling in both football and baseball. At Wofford College, a small liberal arts school in the upstate part of the state, he pitched well enough to eventually be inducted into the school’s athletic hall of fame, and he graduated in 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in finance. Nothing about that path pointed toward a law career. After college, he taught high school and coached baseball, work that had him managing teenagers and building game plans rather than reading case law.
A Teacher, Then an Insurance Claims Specialist
Before he ever set foot in a courtroom, McLain spent time on two very different sides of the eventual career he’d land in. He taught and coached at the high school level, and he also worked as a claims specialist for a major property and casualty insurance company. That claims job turned out to matter more than he probably expected at the time. A claims specialist is the person who reviews an incoming accident or injury claim, decides how much the underlying facts and medical records actually support, and determines what the insurance company should offer, if anything. It’s the kind of work that shows someone exactly how an insurance company evaluates a claim internally, long before that same person ever argues against one on behalf of an injured client.
A Death in the Family Changed the Plan
In the late 1990s, McLain’s mother died suddenly. That loss is what pushed him toward law school, and he earned his J.D. from the University of Tulsa College of Law in 2001, a decade after his finance degree from Wofford. He was admitted to the Oklahoma bar in 2002, along with the Eastern, Northern, and Western Districts of Oklahoma, the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, and the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and began practicing that same year alongside Dan Graves, another Tulsa attorney with his own background in medical malpractice and wrongful death litigation.
Building a Firm Around Serious Cases
McLain and Graves practiced together for eight years before formally co-founding Graves McLain Injury Lawyers in 2010, a run of eight years working side by side that gave the two partners a chance to build a shared approach to serious injury litigation before ever putting both of their names on the door. The firm has built its practice around serious personal injury, wrongful death, medical negligence, and insurance bad faith cases, the exact intersection of McLain’s teaching-era patience and his insider’s read on how insurance claims get built and denied. The firm’s published case results range from $85,000 to $20 million, spanning car and truck accident cases, medical malpractice claims, and bad faith insurance litigation out of its Tulsa office.
What Insurance Bad Faith Cases Actually Involve
Bad faith litigation is a narrower and more specialized area than a standard injury claim. It applies when an insurance company, rather than simply disputing the value of a claim, is alleged to have handled it unreasonably: denying a valid claim without a real investigation, delaying payment without justification, or misrepresenting policy terms to avoid paying what’s owed. Proving bad faith requires showing not just that the insurer got the coverage decision wrong, but that it acted unreasonably in how it reached that decision, which typically means digging into the insurer’s internal claims file and procedures. McLain’s years spent inside that exact process, deciding what an insurance company would and wouldn’t pay, give him a working knowledge of that internal machinery that most personal injury attorneys never get from the outside. It’s a distinction that matters to a client, too: an attorney arguing that an insurer acted unreasonably carries more weight when they can point to specific, expected claims-handling practices the insurer skipped, rather than simply arguing the payout was too low.
The Firm Today
Graves McLain, headquartered in midtown Tulsa, has secured more than $100 million in verdicts and settlements over its 15 years in practice, with its attorneys carrying more than 75 years of combined legal experience. The firm concentrates on motor vehicle accidents and commercial truck crashes, along with the wrongful death, medical negligence, and bad faith work that has defined it since 2002. Among the firm’s other attorneys, Rachel Gusman secured an $11 million settlement in 2012 through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a specialized federal claims process for injuries linked to vaccines, a case result that sits alongside McLain’s own work as part of the firm’s broader track record. Past results, including those cited here, do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future case.
An Official Partnership With the Tulsa Drillers
In 2025, Graves McLain became the Official Personal Injury Lawyers of the Tulsa Drillers, the city’s Double-A baseball team, under a multi-year partnership that includes branded signage and fan engagement activities at ONEOK Field. For a firm co-founded by a former college pitcher, the partnership isn’t just a marketing placement. McLain has said of the deal, “At Graves McLain, we know that winning matters, both on the field and in the courtroom,” a line that connects his own athletic background at Wofford directly to how the firm has chosen to build its local visibility in Tulsa. A sponsorship like this one is a different kind of investment than a billboard or a television spot. It puts the firm’s name in front of families at a minor league ballpark rather than only in front of someone who’s already been in an accident and is searching for a lawyer, a longer-term bet on community familiarity over immediate lead generation.
A Backpack Drive That Outgrew Itself
Outside the courtroom, McLain has spent years building out the firm’s community work in Tulsa. In 2016, the firm launched a backpack drive for underprivileged students in Tulsa Public Schools, starting with a little over 300 backpacks donated to a single elementary school. It’s since grown into an annual effort that supplies more than 2,000 backpacks and sets of school supplies to Tulsa students every year. McLain also volunteers with Lawyers Against Hunger and has spent more than a decade with Tulsa Lawyers for Children, an organization that represents minors in dependency cases, including a term as the group’s president from 2014 to 2015.
Recognition Built Over Two Decades
McLain has been named a Super Lawyer every year since 2011 and was added to Super Lawyers’ Oklahoma Top 50 list starting in 2024, following an earlier run as a Rising Star from 2008 through 2010, a distinction generally reserved for younger attorneys or those earlier in their careers. He carries an AV Preeminent rating from Martindale-Hubbell, the organization’s highest possible rating for legal ability and ethical standards, awarded only after a confidential peer review process, and received the CALI Excellence Award in Insurance Law, given to the top-performing law student in that subject at the time he studied it. He’s a member of Phi Delta Phi, the international legal honor society, along with the Tulsa County Bar Association, the Oklahoma Bar Association, the Oklahoma Association for Justice, and the American Association for Justice.
His leadership roles outside the firm span more than a decade: he currently serves on the board of the Tulsa chapter of the American Heart Association and chaired its 2025 Heart Ball, has chaired the Tulsa County Bar Foundation’s Capital Campaign Committee since 2012, served as a board member of Tulsa Lawyers for Children since 2014, and was president of the Summit Club, a Tulsa civic organization, from 2017 to 2018.
