"Get Me Boies!"

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Gore and his top aides say they were delighted with Boies' advocacy. But after his nuclear defeat in Judge N. Sanders Sauls' trial court, and especially after the final Supreme Court ruling, Boies' critics became operatic. Top trial lawyers with no grudge against Boies agreed that he made missteps. At trial, they said, he presented the wrong witnesses. On appeal, he showed a faulty grasp of the jurisdictional issues, and he boxed himself in by arguing that Dec. 12 was a meaningful deadline. Throughout, he spent too much time talking to the cameras and not enough time preparing.

Even some admirers say Boies can be less than straightforward during settlement negotiations, and many complain that he's maddeningly, even irresponsibly hard to reach because of his tendency to do 17 things at once. His partner Robert Silver acknowledges that "life might be easier" if Boies did only 13 things at once. "But," Silver adds, "you wouldn't want to tinker with the psychology" that makes him eager to do 17 things in the first place.

This is the way Boies rehearses for a critical oral argument: he is in a conference room in San Francisco, spending his Sunday afternoon preparing his appeal in the attempt to vacate a crippling lower-court order in the Napster case. Fueled on junk food (in his hierarchy of tastes, food is not far from clothing), he's thinking at times about another case that he will be arguing the same morning by teleconference to a panel of judges in Los Angeles. And for much of the day, virtually up to the last moments before he enters the marbled and muraled courtroom, he is negotiating by cell phone the half-billion-dollar settlement in the Christie's-Sotheby's case.

And then Boies is on his feet, calmly elucidating--without notes, of course--the four essential points of his argument, his hands sometimes shaking the invisible box, his thumbs sometimes making a pair of goalposts. He cites page numbers and percentages and the specific copyright status of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and My Man Godfrey. Then the sun rises in the west: Boies asks the court's forbearance while he looks up a page number he cannot recall.

The Boies memory is one of the first things cited when people discuss his strengths. What's most impressive about that gift--focused as it may be by the intensified concentration that his dyslexia demands--is Boies' uncanny ability to recall a key fact, legal citation or piece of contradictory testimony at moments of the most intense pressure. Monday, Dec. 11, Boies to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: "The language you're referring to is at page 268 of the Southern Reporter." The Southern Reporter? When did Boies memorize the Southern freaking Reporter? His wife says his ability to distinguish that which matters from that which doesn't makes it appear that he has a prodigious memory when "all he's really doing is just remembering the important things." Boies puts it this way: "I remember things because they're important."