Zac Grubaugh

Zac Grubaugh is a trial lawyer at Gray Broughton Injury Law in Henrico, Virginia, where he represents plaintiffs in serious personal injury and wrongful death cases throughout the Commonwealth. A former Marine Corps judge advocate and career prosecutor, Grubaugh approaches every case as though it will be decided by a jury, using the discipline of the courtroom to pursue full accountability for the wrongfully injured.

Grubaugh was raised in Midlothian, Virginia, after spending his early childhood in Cincinnati, Ohio. His path to the law ran through the United States Marine Corps, a calling shaped in part by his grandfather, a Marine who fought in the Pacific during World War II. After graduating from Virginia Tech in 2008, Grubaugh entered the job market in the depths of the Great Recession and resolved to combine two long-held ambitions: military service and the practice of law. He earned admission to Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, Florida, secured a Marine Corps judge advocate commissioning package, and passed the bar in 2012.

Grubaugh served nearly seven years on active duty as a Marine judge advocate, primarily as a criminal prosecutor, with tours at Camp Pendleton in California and Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina. As a designated special victims prosecutor, he handled many of the military’s most serious sexual offense cases, prosecuting more than 130 criminal cases over the course of his career. One prosecution stayed with him in particular: a Marine days from separation after two decades of service, whose wife, a Japanese civilian living in Okinawa who did not speak English and was reluctant to come forward, had reported years of sexual abuse. Working through interpreters and across multiple commands and international procedural hurdles, Grubaugh built the trust and the evidentiary record needed to bring the case to a general court-martial, and the defendant ultimately pleaded guilty and received sixteen years of confinement. At Cherry Point, he secured a conviction in a sexual assault case that civilian authorities had declined to prosecute for lack of evidence. He left the Marine Corps in 2019 as a Captain with an honorable discharge.

Determined to remain a trial lawyer but ready to leave criminal practice behind, Grubaugh transitioned to civil litigation. For more than four years he served as a civil litigation trial attorney for the City of Richmond, defending the city against personal injury and wrongful death claims, experience that gave him a close view of how insurance companies evaluate claims and how defense attorneys build their cases. In 2023 he dedicated his practice exclusively to representing injured plaintiffs, joining Gray Broughton Injury Law, a Virginia firm whose trial attorneys are drawn largely from the ranks of former military judge advocates and prosecutors. Since making that move, Grubaugh has secured multiple seven-figure settlements and obtained a $20,000,000 jury verdict on behalf of his clients.

That verdict, returned by a jury in Winchester, Virginia, arose from the case of a young client who had endured repeated abuse throughout his childhood and was harmed again by a trusted caretaker at a residential psychiatric facility that was supposed to protect him. Grubaugh carried the case for more than two years before trial, and much of that time was spent earning the trust of a client who had learned not to trust adults. He prepared the client exhaustively for the witness stand and handled his direct examination at trial, and the jury returned a $20,000,000 verdict. For Grubaugh, the result reflects a conviction that runs through his work: that people who have been victimized are often looking less for money than to be heard, and that a trial lawyer’s job is to earn their trust, give them a voice, and pursue the accountability they could not obtain on their own.