Chicago-trained. Now on both sides of the state line.

Where it began

A Chicago start, in rooms where the stakes were high.

McCain’s legal career began in Chicago. After his first year of law school, he served as a judicial extern to U.S. Magistrate Judge Nan R. Nolan of the Northern District of Illinois in the summer of 2000.

He joined The Cochran Firm–Chicago in May 2001 as a law student and stayed on as a newly admitted attorney in 2002, practicing alongside former Chicago Corporation Counsel James D. Montgomery, Sr. and Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. until September 2005, the year Mr. Cochran passed away. There he worked the August 2002 federal jury trial that produced a $4.4 million wrongful-death verdict for the family of Calvin Champion, then argued and won the Sixth Circuit appeal that affirmed it.

Building a practice

Two decades of everyday matters, and a few that made headlines.

In 2005 McCain founded McCain Law Offices in Northwest Indiana. The practice is built on the matters families and small businesses face most — legacy planning and probate, criminal defense, injury, and civil and real estate disputes — handled with the preparation of a trial lawyer and explained in plain English.

Along the way, a handful of cases drew national attention. In the Owsley matter he won a court-ordered exhumation and independent autopsy, then a Seventh Circuit reversal in the family’s federal civil-rights suit. In the Nikki Smith wrongful-death case against Family Christian Center and its pastors, he used litigation to force the release of evidence a grieving mother had been denied. He takes such cases selectively.

Public service and teaching

Inside government. In front of the bar. In the classroom.

McCain served the City of Gary as Corporation Counsel, its chief legal officer, and then as Deputy Mayor, returning to private practice at the end of 2023. From 2011 to 2021 he served as a Commissioner on the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission, helping uphold the standards of the legal profession.

Since 2014 he has taught as guest faculty at the Harvard Law School Trial Advocacy Workshop at the invitation of Harvard Law Professor Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., his co-counsel in the Owsley litigation.

Today

Home on the Illinois side, with Indiana still in reach.

McCain has opened an Illinois office in Homewood, in Chicago’s south suburbs where his career began, and continues to serve clients from his Northwest Indiana office in Gary. A member of the Chicago Inn of Court since 2006, he served as its President in 2023–24. He is a Life Member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc., affiliated with the Chicago (IL) Alumni Chapter.

Career at a glance