DETROIT 2.0 Community Building occurring in the first place,” she says. One of those efforts includes officers and agents meeting with gang members, and detailing the harsh federal penalties that can result from multiple gun and drug charges. “We talk to them first about how, if they commit another crime, here are the penalties that could result,” she says. “They’re very rational. When you call them in and you call them by name and say, ‘I know who you are, I’ve got a file, and I’m telling you next time you commit a drug offense or a gun offense, you’re going to be facing 20 or 30 years,’ they make rational choices based on that information.” (See detroitone.org for more information.) Enforcement remains paramount, but she views her efforts at relationship building in communities as an investment in investigative work that ultimately will pay off in safer communities and even more successful prosecutions by her staff. “We’re trying to do our job to be most effective, and to be most effective requires getting information. That’s the currency we trade in,” she says. “We need information to build cases, and I think whenever you design your program to maximize the amount of information you’re getting, you’re not being soft on crime—you’re actually being effective.” A native of southeast Michigan, McQuade spent the year between her undergraduate work in economics and communications at Michigan and her entrance into law school as a sports writer and copy editor in Rochester, New York. As a journalist in the Lake Ontario port city, she followed several minor league and Syracuse University teams and reported on “high school swim meets and lacrosse games, the Lilac 10K, the fishing derby on Lake Ontario, the beach volleyball game with the celebrity DJs.” And while she calls her newspaper work “great fun,” she was thrilled when she was accepted to Michigan Law; she never returned to journalism, as originally planned.
Following law school, she clerked for the Hon. Bernard A. Friedman on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan and briefly worked at Butzel Long before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit. Along the way, she started dating and then married Dan Hurley, ’90, who also is an assistant U.S. Attorney. When McQuade was promoted and would have been her husband’s boss, he was reassigned to Ohio’s Northern District. They live in Ann Arbor with their four children. Shortly after McQuade was sworn in as the top U.S. Department of Justice official in Michigan in 2010, she restructured the office and its 215 employee positions. The organizational chart hadn’t changed much since the 1970s, when there were 35 lawyers on staff. “We grew to 115 attorneys over the years, but rather than reorganizing we had just added and added and added lawyers,” McQuade explains. “It seemed to me that the challenges of 2010 were very different than the challenges of the 1970s, with national security, cyber crimes, health care fraud, civil rights, and other different challenges that we were looking at.” With smaller units of supervision, there is better accountability, she says. With dedicated legal units for health care, for example, specialists can handle complicated cases. “Those cases can take a long time to put together. They had sometimes languished behind cases that are a little more immediate and have more immediate deadlines,” McQuade says. “By having the dedicated unit, those cases have become very successful, and we have a really thriving health care fraud practice.” She is pleased by the work that her office has accomplished, and she is quick to credit her staff for all the office’s accomplishments. It’s her dream job, she says—or, rather, one of her dream jobs. “If I could be anything I could be in the whole wide world,” McQuade says with a grin but a certain earnestness, “I would be the shortstop for the Tigers.”
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“I discovered I really loved the law. I loved every minute of being in law school at Michigan,” McQuade says. “I knew what a privilege it was, how lucky I was to be there. The legal education you get at Michigan prepares you well for all the legal challenges that you might face in life.”
Her favorite memories are of late-night conversations with her classmates, and she still stays in touch with her five roommates from her 2L and 3L years.
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