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Boies, David

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NO MERRI

odd couple?  2/10 bush v gore; CU

says ~ corp personhood

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02262010/watch_excl.html

David Boies

David Boies is the founder and chairman of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP and is widely regarded as one of the nation's preeminent trial lawyers. He has been named "Lawyer of the Year," by the NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL, runner-up for "Person of the Year," by TIME magazine, The antitrust Lawyer of the Year by the New York Bar Association, and "Commercial Litigator of the Year" by WHO'S WHO.

Mr. Boies is perhaps best known for serving as lead counsel for former Vice-President Al Gore in connection with the litigation relating to the 2000 Presidential election and for serving as special trial counsel for the United States Department of Justice in its successful antitrust suit against Microsoft. In addition, from 1991 to 1993, Mr. Boies was counsel to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in its litigation to recover losses for failed savings and loan associations. Mr. Boies also served as chief counsel and staff director of the United States Senate Antitrust Subcommittee in 1978 and chief counsel and staff director of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee in 1979. 

Recent cases include Mr. Boies' successful representation of American Express in its Antitrust case against Visa and MasterCard in which American Express received a record-breaking $4 billion recovery, Mr. Boies' successful defense of Lloyd's of London in the World Trade Center insurance litigation, Mr. Boies's successful defense of NASCAR in Antitrust litigation charging NASCAR with monopolizing the market for championship auto racing, and the representation of Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg and the C.V. Starr Companies in connection with regulatory and civil litigations. 

Mr. Boies is the author of numerous publications including COURTING JUSTICE, published by Miramax in 2004, and PUBLIC CONTROL OF BUSINESS, published by Little Brown in 1977. He has taught courses at New York University Law School and Cardozo Law School. 

Mr. Boies received honorary LL.D. degrees from the University of Redlands, and from New York Law School, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the LD Access Foundation, the Outstanding Learning Disabled Achievers Award from the Lab School of Washington, D.C., and the William Brennan Award from the University of Virginia. He is a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and the International Academy of Trial Lawyers, and a trustee of St. Luke's/Roosevelt Hospital Medical Center and of Continuum Health Partners, Inc. 

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies

David Boies (born March 11, 1941) is an American lawyer and chairman of the law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner.[1]He has been involved in various high-profile cases in the United States.

Law firm

Boies was an attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where he started upon law school graduation in 1966 and became a partner in 1973.[citation ^needed] He left Cravath in 1997 after a major client objected to his representation of the New York Yankees even though the firm itself had found no conflict.[5] He left the firm within 48 hours of being informed of the client's objection and created his own firm, now known as Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. It is currently rated 17th in "overall prestige" and 12th among New York law firms by Vault.com, a website on legal career information.[citation ^needed]

Government

Boies was also Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the United States Senate Antitrust Subcommittee in 1978, and served as Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee in 1979.[citation ^needed]

Academia

Boies has taught courses at New York University Law School and Cardozo School of Law.[citation ^needed]

Notable cases

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puff http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/19/news/companies/david_boies_profile_full.fortune/#

...

The month after their wedding, Boies got the case that would endear him to the media evermore. Westmoreland, the commander in Vietnam, had sued CBS (CBS, Fortune 500) for $120 million over a documentary alleging Westmoreland had deceived the public by understating the military strength of the enemy. Boies had never handled a libel case and had done little First Amendment work. A couple of years of discovery changed that. Mary Boies got good at standing up for her new husband. "Don't worry," she would quip, "it's a short amendment."

With characteristic meticulousness, Boies and the Cravath squadron outflanked the opposition so badly over four months of trial that Westmoreland surrendered in early 1985. Boies's cross-examinations were so biting that newspaper reporters in the gallery started humming the theme from Jaws when he got up to question a witness. He shredded Westmoreland's credibility. The technique was to continually point out inconsistencies between what Westmoreland was saying in court and what he'd said before. "What you do," Boies says, "is set it up so you get the jury to think he's lying -- before you even suggest he's lying."

The federal judge who presided, Pierre Leval, remembers Boies's craftiness. Early on, Leval had ordered both sides to deliver briefs on a motion to his Manhattan apartment on a Sunday evening. Westmoreland's lawyers left their papers with the doorman. The CBS brief arrived soon thereafter, but the doorman called the judge to say the messenger wanted to deliver it personally. "I opened the door and there's David Boies in a torn sweater," Leval tells Fortune, 25 years later. "I thought to myself, 'How many Cravath partners would do that?' I thought that was very smart -- and I apparently haven't forgotten it."

Boies says the trial was formative, teaching him "to be patient with witnesses and to concentrate on only a few points." Most stories about Boies claim he has a photographic memory. He says he doesn't. Rather, he's skilled at "figuring out what's important" for a jury or judge to understand -- and then fixating on it. Dyslexia may actually help, as it forces him when he's poring over documents to remember only what's in fact crucial or what he thinks will be; either way, he winds up with a condensed narrative of a dispute.

In the process of simplifying, though, Boies puts himself and those around him through the wringer. It is just one of the contradictions about Boies that those who've worked with him regularly grumble about his relentlessness. During the Microsoft case he uttered a famous, or infamous, line. One late night, his legal team was exhausted and wanted a break. Boies would have none of it. "Do you want to win -- or do you want to sleep?" he asked them. They put the line up as a screensaver on their PCs.

Eighteen months after Westmoreland, Boies was in Charleston, S.C., on business. Westmoreland lived there, and Boies ran into him on the street. They exchanged pleasantries. Then they talked briefly about the libel suit. Westmoreland told Boies, "I wish you had been my lawyer."

Westmoreland v. CBS turned Boies into a celebrity. The Four Seasons has a table for him in Midtown Manhattan; the casinos in Las Vegas can't wait until he next visits to play craps for a weekend. Companies in distress aren't immune to the lure of the marquee. Boies says he often gets involved in litigations "when something's already gone wrong" and a company's looking to alter course. So, after Texaco in 1985 lost a $15 billion judgment to Pennzoil -- then the largest award ever and a figure six times Texaco's market capitalization -- Texaco turned to Boies. He made it to the Supreme Court but lost, and in a settlement Texaco had to pay Pennzoil $3 billion.

Nonetheless, before he was 47, Boies had had three bet-your-company defenses -- IBM, CBS, and Texaco -- and achieved two smashing victories. He had become the Clarence Darrow of the Fortune 500....

In this second act, Boies now took on one big case after another that would raise his profile further. First up was U.S. v. Microsoft, in which he'd do the signal cross-examination of his career.

Joel Klein, the antitrust chief at Bill Clinton's Justice Department, wanted Boies to prosecute the case from the outset. It was a politically surprising move to hire the man who helped beat the government in the IBM case. But Klein understood that Boies knew the game from the defense side and would be well equipped to parry Microsoft.

There were risks for Boies -- Microsoft was a much-lionized company, he was busy with his own budding business, the government would pay him a paltry hourly rate -- but he decided it was too exciting a trial to pass up. This was Westmoreland all over again: a cultural icon in the dock, a case that would consume the press. Boies relished the opportunity to duel Bill Gates, if only to test the power of cross-examination applied against someone with Gates' bandwidth. Gates proved to be no match. Boies pounced on him during 20 hours of stonewalling, but with agility rather than ferociousness.

Instead of mocking Gates, Boies gave him the room to bury himself. Some winning cross-examinations end with one mortal blow. Most succeed by 1,000 cuts, without the victim's even realizing it. In one absurd exchange, Boies showed Gates an e-mail in which Gates had typed "Importance: High."

"No," Gates interrupted.

Boies was on his way to a different point, and lesser lawyers would not have recognized a gift. Boies did. "No?" he asked incredulously.

"No, I didn't type that."

"Who typed 'High'?"

"A computer."

"Why did the computer type in 'High'?"

"It's an attribute of the e-mail."

"And who sets the attribute of the e-mail?"

"Usually the sender sets the attribute."

They jousted a few more rounds. And then Boies asked, "Now, did you send this message?"

Replied Gates, unbelievably: "I don't remember doing so."

Evan Chesler, Boies's former Cravath partner, likens him in a trial to a GPS navigation device. "It knows how to get from Point A to Point B, but if you alter direction, it takes time for the gadget to 'recalculate,' " Chesler says. "David always knows the destination, and he has the ability to seamlessly recalculate the route."

While Gates largely won the four-year war with the Justice Department -- under the control of the new Bush administration, in late 2001 it settled on terms favorable to Microsoft -- Boies walked away the folk hero who had embarrassed the smart-aleck boy king.

As Microsoft wound down, Boies took on the case -- a defeat -- that will lead his obituary, Bush v. Gore. His performance at the Supreme Court was less than electrifying. Boies failed to cast the issues in broad historical or political strokes. He didn't sound as constitutionally fluent as Laurence Tribe, the Harvard law professor who argued the case the first time it came before the Supremes only weeks earlier. Boies lost,yet this case burnished his standing just as Microsoft had. His courtroom work in Florida had produced the victories that initiated the electoral recount. Few thought the Supreme Court would reach out to stop it. When Al Gore asked Boies to argue the case in Washington, Boies was being asked to take a bullet. Anybody in Boies's sneakers was destined to fail in Bush v. Gore.

Although U.S. v. Microsoft and Bush v. Gore landed Boies on the evening news, they didn't fill the coffers at Boies Schiller. Lucre wasn't the reason Boies practiced law, but he surely liked the '59 Margaux that came with it.....

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Boies, Schiller & Flexner

big spend 08  dems

Gillibrand, Kirsten (D-NY) $193,300
Obama, Barack (D) $69,538
Romney, Mitt (R) $41,220
Nelson, Bill (D-FL) $26,550
Kerrey, Bob (D-NE) $21,250

Stats

Website(s)

Firm 

Careers

Founded1997Class(es)National, Litigation BoutiqueTotal Offices12Largest OfficeNew YorkTotal Lawyers2502012 Revenue$317.00 millionLeadership

David Boies, Chairman

Yale, LLB, NYU LLM

Jonathan Schiller, Managing Partner

Columbia, JD

Donald Flexner, Managing Partner

NYU LLB

Summer Class25Talking Points

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