The Latest Legal Superstar To Collide With Alan Dershowitz: David Boies

Are there any legal celebrities left who have not gotten involved with this case?

Alan Dershowitz has had the worst luck with lawyers this year. Sure, a woman accusing him of having sex with her multiple times while she was the underage “sex slave” of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein has been terrible. The tabloid gossip. The federal Crime Victims’ Rights Act suit. The besmirching of a hard-won reputation. Terrible. But in 2015, his fellow attorneys have been the sharpest thorns in the side of Alan Dershowitz, the retired Harvard law professor and renowned defense lawyer.

First, it was former federal judge and University of Utah law professor Paul Cassell and Florida victims’ rights attorney Bradley Edwards, who made public the allegations of Dershowitz’s accuser, Virginia Roberts. The personal crossfire between Dershowitz and the other lawyers led Cassell and Edwards to file a defamation suit . . . and Dershowitz to file a countersuit.

Last Wednesday, David Ingram reported for Reuters that luminary litigator David Boies has joined the list of lawyers who Dershowitz insists have done him wrong.

Is Another Legal Superstar Colliding With Dershowitz?

Boies and his firm Boies Schiller & Flexner represent Virginia Roberts, the woman whose sexual misconduct allegations sparked the firestorm with Cassell and Edwards. Not only is Roberts a likely witness in that defamation suit, but Dershowitz insists that she too defamed him. According to Ingram’s report:

Boies’ law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner decided to represent Roberts pro bono in the defamation case as part of a program that focuses on assisting women and children who have been victims of abuse, a spokesman said in an email.

Now Dershowitz has subpoenaed Roberts and Boies’ law firm, asking them to hand over records about a potential book or movie deal for Roberts and anything to support her claims she was kept as a sex slave for years by Epstein.

Maybe Dershowitz believes that Roberts is lying for fame and fortune. Maybe he thinks that Boies wants a piece of a potential movie deal for Roberts, perhaps to benefit his film production company, Boies/Schiller Film Group. Maybe he thinks that Boies Schiller is representing Virginia Roberts pro bono in exchange for a crack at the rights to her story. Whatever the details, Dershowitz means to find out.

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Is This ‘Directly Adverse’ Enough For You?

But it gets worse. According to Ingram’s article, “Dershowitz said he is keeping open the option of asking a judge to disqualify Boies and his firm from the defamation case because of a potential conflict of interest. Dershowitz said the conflict arose from earlier discussions he had about Boies’ firm representing him in the defamation case. Boies, Schiller & Flexner declined to comment.”

If Dershowitz met with Boies to discuss the Epstein-Roberts fiasco behind the defamation suit, Dershowitz might have spilled a bean or two that could hurt Dershowitz in the defamation suit. Given how loose his lips are while he’s in front of the press, just imagine how chatty he gets behind closed doors. Whether or not Dershowitz was an actual client or a prospective one, Boies would need to be very careful.

At the moment, the extent of David Boies’s individual involvement is unclear. It seems implausible that two sophisticated lawyers like Dershowitz and Boies would be flummoxed by a professional ethics issue like this. Perhaps, though, the potential conflict of interests traces back to two other lawyers. Consider a few details that Dershowitz later shared with Vivia Chen:

According to Dershowitz, Boies Schiller partner Carlos Sires in Florida had volunteered to represent him in his defamation suit against Roberts. After delivering a confidential memo to Sires about the matter, Dershowitz said he learned that the firm already represented Roberts.

“I wrote to Sires that you are such a mensch, and I’m sorry you’re in the middle of all this,” says Dershowitz. “But your firm can’t continue to represent [Roberts] because you’ve all read my material.”

Dershowitz says he asked Boies Schiller to recuse itself: “They answered no.”

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A partner in Boies Schiller & Flexner’s Fort Lauderdale office named Sigrid Stone McCawley appears to be part of the legal team supporting Virginia Roberts. A February 2015 New York Daily News piece quotes McCawley and refers to her as “one of Roberts’ current lawyers.” McCawley is also the Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of ChildNet, the organization designated by the State of Florida to manage the protection of neglected and abused children in Broward County. She also helps with Cary’s Kids, a children’s charity supported by the Caryl Louise Boies Memorial Foundation.

Something sure does smell fishy here. And the odor is coming straight from the attorneys.

Note that Carlos Sires and Sigrid Stone McCawley are both partners in the Fort Lauderdale office of Boies Schiller & Flexner. The firm’s website lists only 23 lawyers for its Fort Lauderdale location. That’s smaller than a third-grade class at most public schools.

How could Sires and McCawley not know about the other’s client? Do they talk about nothing over the water cooler? Is doing a full post-mortem on the latest episode of “Archer” so consuming that lawyers in the Fort Lauderdale office didn’t get around to mentioning to one another that they had recently acquired two of the biggest headline-grabbing clients of 2015? Even when the headlines have mostly been about the feud between the two clients? I feel like that would come up at some point, even without the firm’s standard conflict-check procedures.

Alan Dershowitz called for the disbarment of Paul Cassell and Brad Edwards earlier this year. Will he do the same for David Boies? For Carlos Sires and Sigrid McCawley? Maybe. Given Dershowitz’s bad luck with lawyers lately, he should probably keep an eye on everyone involved in the proceedings. Possibly even himself.


Tamara Tabo is a summa cum laude graduate of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the school’s law review. After graduation, she clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She currently heads the Center for Legal Pedagogy at Texas Southern University, an institute applying cognitive science to improvements in legal education. You can reach her at tabo.atl@gmail.com.