Get Me Boies!

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When he enrolled at the University of Redlands and learned that classes consumed only 14 hours a week, Boies set out to fill the extra time. Although he was married with two children by the end of his sophomore year, he piled on more work (teaching journalism at a nearby mental hospital), then more fun (usually card playing) and more extracurriculars (including, George W. Bush would be surprised to learn, the presidency of the campus Young Republicans). He also added more classes, finishing three years' study in two years. He then took off for law school at Northwestern. James Fox Miller, a classmate who is now a prominent Hollywood, Fla., lawyer, remembers listening to Boies speak in a first-year class. "It was mesmerizing," he says. "The first week of law school, and I come home and say to my wife, 'If everyone here is that smart, I'm in trouble.'"

While Boies was at Northwestern, his first marriage broke up. Soon after, he was banished from the law school for engaging in an affair with a professor's wife (she later married him). Boies completed his law degree at Yale and went to work for Cravath, Swaine & Moore, a gilt-edged New York law firm. At Cravath the individual is utterly subordinate to the institution, and all partners, irrespective of how much business they bring in or how successful they are, are paid the same. It was an unlikely place for an oddball like Boies--How many Cravath partners spend vacations at Las Vegas craps tables?--but the firm had the clients and thus the cases that could hold his interest.

During his nearly 30 years at the firm, he managed to inflame associates who couldn't bear his brutal capacity for work ("Would you rather sleep," he would ask, "or win?") and offend partners who resented his freelancing ways. Late in his career with Cravath, Boies was virtually a separate firm within the firm, using outside lawyers rather than Cravath's own soldiers to assist him on big cases.

The stated cause for his leaving was a client conflict involving Boies' wish to represent New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner in a suit against Major League Baseball, which meant against all its teams. The Atlanta Braves were owned by Time Warner, a longtime and big-time Cravath client. Less than 48 hours after his partners asked him to make a choice, Boies announced his departure. Remarkably, the New York Times put the story on the front page.

Of course, celebrity attracts celebrity. Calvin Klein, Don Imus and Garry Shandling are among Boies' clients. And as you watched him in Florida last month, you could almost sense another flight of A-list names reaching for their phones, saying, "Get me David Boies!"