The pace isn’t likely to slow down. After all, he’s emerged as a go-to litigator whenever some high-profile business brawl calls for some lawyerly help. In the three years since he left prestigious Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York to start his own firm, his name has shown up in more places than the “Love Bug” computer virus. Boies not only does Windows, bluejeans and pricey art, but he and his partners have played a range of legal roles in everything from the big vitamin price-fixing case of last year to the merger of AOL-Time Warner to helping tech companies go public. Although Boies has been trying big cases for years, the Microsoft case has helped make him a $700-an-hour brand name in legal circles. “David Boies is on the cusp of becoming one of those lawyers who has achieved legendary status, like Webster or Darrow,’’ says Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University.
That’s not an easy club to get into. Boies has been at the center of some of the biggest cases in the country in recent decades, and has almost always emerged victorious (one loss was the failed attempt by Continental Airlines to sue American over predatory pricing in 1993). And he’s provided some of the more memorable theater to emerge from a courtroom. It was Boies who conducted the withering, 20-hour deposition of Bill Gates, making the Microsoft chairman appear out of the loop on key corporate matters and argumentative about the meaning of words like “concern,” “compete” and “definition.”
Boies cut an unusual path to the top of his profession. He left Cravath, an unheard-of career move. He doesn’t dress like any white-shoe attorney, either: he wears black sneakers in court and navy blue suits from Lands’ End. He buys cheap knit ties by the bushel, and wears a simple watch on the outside of his sleeve (to easily glance at it during trial). He set up headquarters in sleepy Armonk, N.Y., far from the corridors of power. There’s no bluster from Boies in the courtroom; he patiently draws out responses during cross-examination that he uses hours or days later to paint the witness into a corner. He works without notes, casually following the natural course of interrogations as if rafting down some lazy river. “His management of the Microsoft case in the courtroom was nothing short of superb,’’ says William Kovacic, a George Washington University law professor.
Even judges get caught up in the lawyer’s charm. After Boies picked apart a videotaped presentation by a Microsoft witness, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson was overheard saying during a bench conference with attorneys from both sides: “Mr. Boies has done a very professional job of discrediting those tapes.” The judge handling the Sotheby’s and Christie’s matter chose Boies from among 20 firms to lead the case, in part based on each firm’s proposed fee structure. But the judge may have also favored Boies simply because he wanted to see him in action in his courtroom.
When Boies started his firm with Jonathan Schiller in 1997, he said he wanted it to remain “small enough to be flexible and avoid the conflicts that happen whenever you’re part of a large institution.” He figured that meant stopping at about 40 or 50 lawyers. The firm –now Boies, Schiller & Flexner –has 60 lawyers today, and Boies now wants to build to a critical mass of at least 80 attorneys. At this rate, Boies’s firm may be as dominant in the field of business law as Microsoft is in operating systems.
