Adrenaline Junkie

There’s no shortage of shark jokes in the legal industry. Actually swimming alongside nature’s top predators? Quite another thing.

But Kelly McClure doesn’t even consider swimming with sharks to be her most dangerous quest. The Dallas family law attorney would tie it with heli-skiing in Alaska and swimming 1.5 treacherous miles from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco’s shore.

The bigger the challenge, the better, as far as this self-described adrenaline junkie is concerned. Items checked off her bucket list include: diving (deep sea, cliff and sky); hang gliding; surfing; and swinging on the flying trapeze. No surprise that McClure drives a McLaren, one of the fastest vehicles on the road. 

“I like speed. I like that thrill,” she says. “I just enjoy a new adventure. I like the feeling of attacking it, of seizing the day.” 

One such day involved being dropped from a helicopter onto a remote mountain with skis, an avalanche shovel strapped to her back, and a can of spray paint to mark her pickup spot. “There would be a hole right in front of you, like 50 feet down, that you just are lucky that you saw,” she recalls. “They don’t mark, ‘Oh, here’s a cliff,’ or ‘Here’s a big crevasse or a glacier.’ If you go straight down, you go straight down into the abyss.” 

She wants to go again. Maybe after her family’s Thanksgiving trip to Australia to try catching a fast-swimming great black marlin, an elusive fish that can weigh around 1,000 pounds. 

“Doesn’t that sound like fun?” McClure asks, noting she and one son have already caught (and released) a 900-pound shark.

The third of four sisters, McClure swam competitively in high school and college, and began scuba diving at 20. She had hoped to attend the U.S. Air Force Academy and become a pilot, but at the time, she says, women could only fly cargo. So she sought other adventures.

McClure met her husband, Wade, an attorney at Mayer Law Firm, while both were studying at the University of Oxford. While he doesn’t quite share his wife’s daredevil approach to life, Wade also loves diving, and agreed to take trapeze lessons with her.

The couple had their four sons—including a pair of twins—within four years, and even their family life might be considered gutsy. They passed along to the kids both a love of adventure and of law. Three became attorneys; her two older sons, Buck and Brody, practice at her firm, McClure Law Group, where her niece, paralegal Anna Lee Painter, serves as office manager. Son Gavin is with Scheef & Stone; his twin brother, Grant, majored in outdoors study in Alaska and is now a fisherman in Florida, giving McClure an excuse to spend more time near the ocean.

“If I had my way, I’d swim a couple miles in the ocean every day,” she says. “I just hop in the ocean anywhere I am. I always bring my suit and my goggles. I could swim for hours and never get tired.”

In fact, she swims in her backyard pool for an hour each morning, rising at 5:15 a.m. With her family, she dives, skis and golfs—though that last activity is a bit slow for her taste. 

More her speed? The Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon, in which she, son Brody and another McClure attorney competed. McClure swam from the former prison in waters where great whites have occasionally been spotted.  

As for purposely swimming with sharks, McClure encountered 600-pounders in Hawaii—another “pretty fun” escapade, she says. In the Bahamas, she participated in a tour at a sunken ship, where a chain mail-suited diver speared fish from a box, attracting about 50 hungry carnivores. 

McClure says she has never been injured during her adventures—even managing to avoid blisters on a 12-day backpacking trek with her two Eagle Scout sons in New Mexico. But risk is always present; a fellow triathlete suffered a fatal heart attack in the water, and two heli-skiers who landed after her broke their legs. 

Asked if any activity is too outrageous to try, McClure replies, “I don’t think so. I like to be ready for anything. … The only thing that ever scared me was when my kids were sick.”   

Painter confirms, “If she came in tomorrow and said, ‘I’m gonna go climb Mount Everest,’ I would be like, ‘OK, she’s gonna do it.’”

No scaling Everest so far, though McClure really wants to. Unfortunately, she says, “None of the kids have volunteered yet.” She hasn’t talked her husband into it, either, but adds, “There’s still hope.”