Biglaw, Litigators, Partner Issues

At Lunch With David Boies, 20 Years After His Departure From Cravath

The country's most famous practicing lawyer tells the tale of how he left Cravath to launch his own firm.

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David Boies (photo by David Lat)

David Boies (photo by David Lat)

Twenty years ago this month, David Boies left the storied partnership of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. And the world of Biglaw — or the legal world in general, or even the world at large — hasn’t been the same since.

This legendary litigator — yes, I like alliteration, but the sobriquet truly applies here — needs no introduction to readers of Above the Law, or to informed citizens more generally. David Boies is the nation’s most famous practicing lawyer (no, Judge Judy doesn’t count). It seems he’s been involved in every major litigation of the past 50 years, from the IBM and Microsoft antitrust cases, to Bush v. Gore, to Hollingsworth v. Perry and the battle for marriage equality.

These high-stakes cases explain why even your non-lawyer relatives and friends know of David Boies. But within Biglaw circles, he’s also famous for founding Boies Schiller Flexner (“BSF”). The spectacularly successful firm, with more than 300 lawyers across 14 offices, enjoys a reputation as a “national litigation powerhouse.” And it has the financial rewards to prove it: profits per partner of $3.15 million in 2016, according to the latest Am Law 100 rankings, and associate bonuses as high as $350,000.

Based on how much you’ve read about Boies over the years, you might feel you know him already; few lawyers have generated as many media mentions. At his Georgian-style mansion in the tony suburb of Armonk, New York, a hallway connecting his two wine cellars is lined with his press clippings. And then there are the books, including legal journalist Karen Donovan’s v. Goliath: The Trials of David Boies and Boies’s own (superb) memoir, Courting Justice.

But how well do you really know David Boies? How much do you know about this legal superhero’s “origin story”?

Those of us of a certain age are familiar with his involvement in cases like Bush v. Gore or Hollingsworth v. Perry because we followed them in real time. Less well known, but no less fascinating, are his early days as a lawyer post-Cravath — how he quit the partnership of one of the world’s most prestigious and profitable law firms to go hang a shingle in the suburbs — a tale to which I now turn.

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A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of lunching with Boies at Sparks Steak House.[1] Boies used to be a regular at the Four Seasons, where he estimates he has dined more than 500 times, sometimes twice in the same day; but after that renowned restaurant closed last year, he patronizes a rotating set of midtown eateries.

When I arrived shortly before our noon meeting time, Boies was already ensconced in his regular corner table — an excellent spot, visible to the entire room and yet not within earshot of other diners. We were joined by his longtime publicist, Dawn Schneider, an unobtrusive presence; she occasionally jumped in with helpful questions and comments, but Boies is an old hand when it comes to talking to journalists.

Part of the David Boies legend is his rejection of high fashion. He’s a millionaire many times over, and many aspects of his lifestyle reflect what I’m guessing is a nine-figure net worth — his primary residence, an 8,000-square-foot mansion on almost 10 acres; an $8 million pied-à-terre here in New York City, at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel; and a racing yacht, because you’re nobody until you have a yacht. But his wealth doesn’t go into his wardrobe. He eschews Prada and Patek Philippe in favor of navy blue suits from Sears or Lands’ End, inexpensive plastic wristwatches (worn over his sleeve), and what look like black sneakers (but are actually walking shoes by Merrell).

So I was pleasantly surprised by his appearance on the day we met. The 76-year-old Boies was looking trim and healthy, sporting a summery, button-down shirt in blue gingham under a well-fitted blue blazer. If the shirt and jacket were inexpensive, they didn’t look it.

Soon after my arrival, our waiter — an old-school “waiter,” an older white male with a hard-to-place European accent, not a chirpy “server” fresh out of hospitality school — hustled over to pour wine for “Mr. David” and his guests. I’m not much of a drinker (thanks to the “Asian flush”), and certainly not a midday drinker, but this pour I couldn’t refuse.

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Hawk and Horse Vineyards

Hawk and Horse Vineyards

Boies is an oenophile, an avid wine collector (his collection contains more than 8,000 bottles), and also a winemaker. He’s the founder and owner of Hawk and Horse Vineyards in Lake County, California, from where our cabernet came. I usually find cabernet sauvignon a bit oaky and overpowering, but this wine was perfect — well balanced, yet robust enough to stand up to a steak lunch.

After tasting the (delightful) wine, we placed our orders. Boies went with a shrimp cocktail to start and vacillated between the filet mignon and the lamb chops, before going with the lamb — medium, charred on the outside. After hearing the waiter advise Boies that the lamb was healthier than the filet, I went with the filet. We declined the sides like hash browns or baked potatoes (no carbs for this lean litigator), then dove into our discussion.

In 1997, Cravath, Swaine & Moore (“CSM”) was arguably the nation’s number-one law firm (a status it maintains to this day, although its grip on the crown was even stronger back then). It’s rare to see partners leave Cravath, and it was even more rare 20 years ago.

This New York Times Magazine cover story came out when Boies was still at Cravath.

This New York Times Magazine cover story, featuring a baby-faced Boies, came out in June 1986, when he was still at Cravath.

David Boies was then one of Cravath’s most prominent partners, thanks to his successful handling of IBM’s antitrust litigation and CBS’s defense of a libel lawsuit from General William Westmoreland. Boies was 56, seemingly in the prime of his career, earning a reported $2.1 million a year (a much bigger deal in 1997 than today). He had been at Cravath for some thirty years, the entirety of his legal career since graduating from Yale Law School in 1966 (except for two years working on antitrust and judiciary issues for the U.S. Senate).

Why on earth would Boies want to leave the Death Star to become an Ewok in the wilds of Westchester? As it turned out, he didn’t have much of a choice.

At the time Boies was representing the New York Yankees in an antitrust dispute with Major League Baseball over a practice called “revenue sharing.” This did not sit well with Time Warner, one of Cravath’s most longstanding and lucrative clients, which had recently acquired Turner Broadcasting System — owner of the Atlanta Braves, a potential defendant in the Yankees/MLB litigation.

This was a business conflict rather than a true conflict in the legal-ethics sense (as ethics experts like Geoffrey Hazard of Penn Law and Stephen Gillers of NYU Law said at the time). If anything, ethical considerations pointed in the direction of not abandoning a client midstream because of objections from a different client — which is why Boies was determined to stand by the Yankees, no matter what.

Time Warner, however, stood firm in its opposition to Cravath working for the Yankees — a position that CEO Gerald Levin communicated in a Friday afternoon phone call to Samuel Butler, Cravath’s presiding partner (and the relationship partner for Time Warner). Butler in turn conveyed this to Boies, on vacation in Las Vegas, that same afternoon. By the time Boies walked from his room at Caesar’s Palace back to the craps table, he had a sense that he might have to leave Cravath.[2]

The next few days passed in a blur. Boies returned to New York on Saturday night, a day earlier than planned. Over the weekend, he consulted with his wife (and fellow lawyer), Mary McInnis Boies; some of his partners, including Sam Butler and Tom Barr, another top Cravath litigator; and his client George Steinbrenner, owner of the Yankees. Boies proposed a compromise — not naming the Braves as a defendant in the Yankees’ yet-to-be-filed lawsuit, which Steinbrenner was fine with — but Time Warner remained adamant.[3]

Torn between loyalty to his client and to his firm, Boies felt that the best solution for all involved would be for him to resign from Cravath. And that’s exactly what he did when the weekend was over.

On Friday afternoon, David Boies was a partner at Cravath with three or four active cases and a dozen lawyers working for him. On Tuesday afternoon, he had no colleagues and one client, the Yankees. As he said to a reporter at the time, “When I graduated from law school, I had zero clients, and now I have one client, the Yankees. So I see myself as ahead of the game.”

And he quickly had more than one client. Within hours of the news breaking, Boies received calls from the general counsel of DuPont, the general counsel of Georgia Pacific, and real estate magnate Sheldon Solow. Each of them said, “Now you have two clients.”[4]

With four (and soon more) clients, Boies confronted a different problem: no lawyers. When he left Cravath, a parting both sides described as amicable (at least officially), the firm was supportive and helpful; CSM gave him furniture, including his old desk, and help from its IT staff in setting up his new office. But Boies, for his part, agreed not to take anyone out of Cravath for a year.

Luckily, one of Boies’s most trusted colleagues from his Cravath days, fellow Yale Law grad Robert Silver, was no longer at the firm, having returned to YLS on an academic fellowship. When Boies reached out to Silver, Silver joined his former mentor without hesitation.[5]

Another lawyer who couldn’t resist the call of David Boies: his son Jonathan, graduating from Tulane Law School that year. Jonathan was scheduled to join Kaye Scholer, but when David called his good friend and Kaye Scholer partner Jonathan Schiller and said “I need my son,” Schiller understood.

Mary McInnis Boies

Mary McInnis Boies (via Wikimedia)

The next issue: office space, or the lack thereof. David Boies initially moved into the offices of his wife Mary’s successful boutique firm, Boies & McInnis, in nearby Bedford. Mary had launched her firm in 1988, after serving as an in-house lawyer at CBS and on the White House Domestic Policy Staff, and the firm had grown to include about a half-dozen lawyers. David thought that Mary’s business model could become his model: a thriving boutique, with a handful of associates, located just a few miles from his home.

As we all know, that isn’t how things turned out. What happened?

“What I didn’t take into account was that Mary was much more disciplined and capable of saying no than I am,” Boies told me (seemingly indifferent to the fat, juicy shrimp arrayed before him, as I dug into my wedge salad). “I had a hard time turning down cases. And for the types of complex cases we wanted to do, we needed a critical mass of lawyers, so it was hard to keep to that small-firm model.”

And it was hard for David to remain in Mary’s offices.

“It lasted about 48 hours,” he recalled. “As Mary has said, it was a choice between continuing to share office space, or continuing to stay married. I totally destroyed everything — papers everywhere, her phone lines tied up, her fax lines tied up.” (For those of you who don’t know what a fax is, see here.)

“On Friday afternoon, Mary popped in said, ‘Sweetheart, how about we drive around and see if we can find you some offices?”

David and Mary Boies found a loft in Armonk, about four miles from their home, that fit the bill. It was a huge open space, with no private offices, so it needed some work. But because it had been previously occupied by a direct-mail and telemarketing firm, it had phone jacks galore (which was important back then; VoIP was not a thing yet). After going to Costco to buy bookshelves and folding tables to complement David’s old Cravath desk, they were up and running.

I raised an eyebrow at the Costco furniture. Shouldn’t a law office smell of leather-bound books and rich mahogany? But fancy furniture was not a priority for Boies: “I work wherever I am. It’s the trial mentality. When you’re on trial, you work out of a war room.”

Jonathan Schiller

Jonathan Schiller (via Boies Schiller Flexner)

For the first few months, David Boies & Associates consisted of David, his son Jonathan, Bob Silver, and one or two other lawyers. The next big change came in September 1997, when Jonathan Schiller left the D.C. office of Kaye Scholer to join David Boies. The two men had been co-counsel on several matters over the years and had talked from time to time about joining forces; in fact, when Boies was leaving Cravath, Schiller tried to lure him to Kaye Scholer. But Boies didn’t want to go to another large firm and instead tried to convince Schiller to leave Kaye Scholer. It took Schiller a few months to make it happen, but happen it did. With his arrival, the firm became Boies & Schiller.[6]

Schiller was based out of Washington (we previously profiled his D.C. Lawyerly Lair), and his joining gave the firm a second office. Schiller also brought in additional colleagues, including William “Bill” Isaacson, then a junior partner at Kaye Scholer.[7]

Lawyers are great and all, but as everyone knows, a firm can’t survive without its staff. Having left Cravath, which had (and still has) some of the best staff in the business, Boies suddenly had to deal with all the issues that were magically taken care of when he was at CSM. As legal journalist Karen Donovan wrote in v. Goliath: The Trials of David Boies, David’s wife Mary “could not imagine Boies divorced from the elaborate and intricate services that Cravath provided to its partners. ‘He had never bothered with the details that can grind you down.'”

I asked Boies: in the early days of the firm, how did you handle such matters? Finance and billing, information technology, human resources, and compliance with laws and regulations, whether federal or state or local?

“In the beginning,” he said with a sheepish smile, “I’m not sure we complied.”

In the first few years, Boies and his lawyers were so busy litigating cases and representing clients that they didn’t focus much on administrative issues — and sometimes things fell through the cracks. For instance, well after opening its Oakland office, the firm learned it had neglected to pay a certain city tax — which it had to pay belatedly, with interest and apologies.

Yes, Boies & Schiller added staffers, but not many. Administrative functions were initially overseen by a partner’s girlfriend. The firm didn’t get a bookkeeper until a year or so after launch (and even then, she worked only part-time). There was no recruiting or human resources department per se; personnel matters were handled by several different staffers, none of whom had experience in HR.

So as of September 1997, Boies & Schiller had about ten lawyers and a similar number of staffers working out of two offices, in Armonk and Washington. The firm did not have a presence in New York City, interestingly enough, and would not have a Manhattan office for quite some time.

“We number our offices,” Boies told me. “Armonk is #1, D.C. is #2, Orlando is #3 — we opened there in October 1997 — and New York is somewhere around #6.”

Orlando? I briefly imagined David Boies exclaiming, “I just left Cravath — I’m going to Disney World!”

“One of our first clients was Florida Power and Light,” he explained. “The lawyers who launched our Orlando office worked with FPL. Some of them had worked with Jonathan at Kaye Scholer, and one of them I knew from my work at Cravath, so there was a certain logic to it.”

Launching in Orlando before New York or San Francisco reflected a truth about the early days of Boies Schiller. Although David Boies and Jonathan Schiller knew what types of matters they wanted — the most complex, interesting, and challenging cases around, for defendants and plaintiffs, sometimes on a contingency-fee basis — they did not have a grand plan for growing their firm. Instead of unfolding according to some detailed blueprint or business plan, the firm grew organically and opportunistically.

Joel Klein

Joel Klein (via Wikimedia)

One crucial opportunity for growth came near the end of 1997. Prior to joining Kaye Scholer, Schiller had been partners at a boutique firm with a leading antitrust lawyer, Joel Klein. Klein went on to become the assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice, the nation’s top antitrust enforcement official, under President Bill Clinton.

In November 1997, Joel Klein reached out to Jonathan Schiller to see if Boies & Schiller would be interested in representing the Justice Department in a possible antitrust action against the software giant Microsoft. Today Microsoft and Windows have lost some of their mojo to Apple and Google and Facebook, but back then, Microsoft was both dominant in tech and wildly popular. As Fortune reported in February 1998, “Americans love Microsoft. They love its products. They admire its CEO.” Microsoft was the world’s most valuable company, having surpassed rivals like IBM and Exxon in market capitalization, and CEO Bill Gates was the richest man on the planet.

The idea of going up against Microsoft was daunting, even for veteran litigators like Boies and Schiller. The company had seemingly limitless resources, enabling it to hire the best legal and public-relations talent that money could buy. Its deep coffers also meant it could go the distance, dragging litigation out for years — much like the government’s legal battle against IBM, where Cravath and Boies prevailed against the government after thirteen long years.

Microsoft did not look like an ideal matter for a brand-new firm of a dozen or so lawyers. Boies admitted as much: “We had just gotten started, and we were already in way over our heads — far too much work, far too few lawyers. At Cravath, you worked hard but you had a lot of resources. Here, we were resource-constrained.”

Given all these considerations, why did Boies & Schiller agree to take on United States v. Microsoft?

“It was a case we just couldn’t turn down.”

On the bright side, the initial work called primarily for legal analysis as opposed to manpower. Boies was an antitrust expert, thanks to his work on the IBM case and on Capitol Hill, and capable of seeing things from a company’s point of view as opposed to the government’s. The DOJ wanted Boies to determine, as a threshold matter, whether or not there was a viable case against Microsoft for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act.

After Boies concluded that there was in fact a strong case against Microsoft, Attorney General Janet Reno approved the lawsuit. Boies and the antitrust division prepared a draft complaint. The government took its concerns to Microsoft and tried to resolve matters prior to filing suit. After those talks broke down, United States v. Microsoft got filed — in May 1998, just one short year after Boies left Cravath to go out on his own.

John Warden (via Sullivan & Cromwell)

John Warden (via Sullivan & Cromwell)

Determined not to let Microsoft drag on like the IBM litigation, Boies and the government outlined a plan for trying the case in fall 1998. Microsoft, represented by John Warden and Sullivan & Cromwell, argued that any trial date before 1999 was unrealistic. But Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson — an experienced, no-nonsense jurist, and a trial lawyer himself before taking the bench — agreed with the government and set a trial date for September 1998.

Discovery got underway in June 1998 and finished in five months — an impressively short period, given the size and complexity of the case (but it’s amazing what well-resourced Biglaw firms can do when a court holds their feet to the fire). In October, the bench trial before Judge Jackson commenced.

Bill Gates at his deposition (via YouTube)

Bill Gates at his deposition (via YouTube)

The most important part of the case, Boies told me, was persuading Judge Jackson that he couldn’t just take everything Microsoft told him at face value (especially as to complicated technological matters). Boies and his colleagues achieved this goal by catching Microsoft witnesses — including Bill Gates, whose deposition testimony was played at trial, to devastating effect — in statements that were evasive, not entirely accurate, or inconsistent with documents or plain common sense.

Gates, perhaps suffering from “smartest guy in the room” syndrome, sparred with Boies over the meaning of words like “ask” and “browser.” When asked who typed “Importance: High” on an email, he said, “A computer.” Such antics might have made Gates feel good at the time, but didn’t go over well with Judge Jackson.

Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson (via Wikimedia)

Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson (via Wikimedia)

In November 1999, Judge Jackson issued detailed findings of fact that were devastating to Microsoft, laying out the company’s monopoly power and anticompetitive conduct in some 412 numbered paragraphs. In April 2000, after unsuccessful mediation talks presided over by Judge Richard Posner — if anyone could have resolved this matter, it would have been Posner — Judge Jackson issued his conclusions of law. He held that Microsoft had engaged in monopolization and tying, in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. In June, he ordered Microsoft to change its business practices and to break up its operating systems and applications programming businesses into two separate companies.

Judge Jackson’s order on remedy was stayed as Microsoft appealed to the D.C. Circuit (fun fact: future Chief Justice John Roberts, then in the Solicitor General’s office, argued in the case). The D.C. Circuit affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded for reconsideration of the remedy. The Justice Department, by now under the more business-friendly Bush Administration, settled with Microsoft on terms widely viewed as favorable to the company — the proverbial slap on the wrist, according to critics.

In light of the settlement, which fell far short of a breakup of Microsoft, what did United States v. Microsoft achieve?

“A key question in the Microsoft case was the applicability of the antitrust laws to high-tech industries,” Boies said, noting the argument by some, including Microsoft, that traditional antitrust analysis can’t apply to dynamic industries in the technology space. “One of the accomplishments of the case was to show that you can apply the antitrust laws to technology — and this understanding made room for the next generation of innovators, the Googles and the Facebooks of the world, to come along.”

Reasonable minds can disagree over United States v. Microsoft and whether it was good or bad for antitrust law, high-tech industries, or innovation. But what can’t be disputed is that Microsoft, which David Boies picked up just a few months after leaving Cravath, took him and Boies & Schiller to a new level of fame (and fortune, given the lucrative matters that came their way as a result).

To use tech-world parlance, Microsoft is when Boies “went viral.” The case introduced Boies to a whole generation of Americans too young to remember Westmoreland v. CBS or the IBM antitrust litigation. And it helped Boies Schiller obtain the cases and clients that fueled its growth into what it is today.

As our lunch drew to a close — having enjoyed my steak, I now had a post-meal cup of coffee before me — I asked Boies: if he could identify a secret to BSF’s success over the last two decades, what would he point to?

“One of the things we did right, from the very beginning, was that we did not bring on any lawyer who was not absolutely the best,” Boies said, in between sips of the Diet Coke he ordered instead of coffee. “We stuck to this policy even when we desperately needed more resources and were turning away business — and nobody wants to turn away business. In the short run, we left money on the table, but in the long run, this served us well.” (Jonathan Schiller said essentially the same thing — in a nutshell, “it’s the talent, stupid” — in his recent Forbes interview with David Parnell.)

It’s helpful to know what successful law firms and lawyers have done right. But it’s perhaps just as helpful to learn about mistakes and cautionary tales (which we cover extensively on Above the Law). I next asked Boies: looking back on both your career and on the history of Boies Schiller Flexner, what would you have done differently?

“When things work out well, it’s hard to know what you would have done differently,” he noted — but after this observation, which led me to fear he was dodging, he did what a good advocate does and answered the question.

Boies Schiller Flexner's office in Palo Alto

Boies Schiller Flexner’s office in Palo Alto

First, Boies and his partners could have plotted out the firm’s growth more carefully, launching in locations in a way that was less opportunistic and more strategic. If they had launched in Palo Alto earlier, for example, their high-tech practice might have grown at a faster rate.

Second, regarding administrative matters, “we were wildly inefficient in the early days.” The firm should have hired more support staff, at an earlier point in its history, to manage the many functions that come with the territory of having a world-class law firm.

Third, BSF in the beginning provided too little in the way of formal training for our lawyers. “We’ve improved, and I’d now give us a B+ on training,” Boies said. “But in the early days, we were probably a C-.”

All this said, Boies doesn’t have much in the way of regrets. It’s quite possible that these perceived shortcomings actually contributed to the firm’s success in unexpected ways.

“If we had focused more on administrative things, we might not have been as focused on our cases,” Boies said. “If we had less of a sink-or-swim environment, our associates might not have gotten the early responsibility that helped them grow as lawyers very quickly.”

Despite improvements in training, feedback, and mentoring, BSF will never be a hand-holding sort of environment for young attorneys: “This is still, and probably always will be, a firm where lawyers get enormous responsibility early on.”

There are two reasons for this. First, there’s the firm’s structure. Because BSF has relatively low leverage, i.e., a low ratio of associates to partners, it can’t “tier” as much as other firms, with junior associates reporting to midlevels, and midlevels reporting to seniors. If BSF fields a team of four lawyers for a matter that a different firm would have assigned eight or twelve lawyers to handle, those four lawyers will get much more responsibility.

Second, there’s the firm’s extensive use of alternative fee arrangements (AFAs). Although BSF lawyers do have hourly rates — Boies reportedly charges $2,000 an hour (so my lunch was, in a sense, a $3,000 lunch) — about 50 percent of the firm’s work is done on AFAs, including flat fees or contingent fees. Because the firm isn’t getting paid to drag out matters, its lawyers must be efficient, which puts pressure on young lawyers.

Of course, BSF associates are paid well for their work. Under the firm’s unusual compensation system, associates essentially get a portion of the revenue they generate for the firm. So if they work unusually long hours, handle a contingency fee case that hits big, or bring in a lucrative matter, that gets reflected in their year-end bonuses — which routinely hit six figures, even for junior associates.

Boies stressed a point he has made to me before in our annual December chats about BSF bonuses: “Our compensation system is based not on generosity but on fairness. We pay people the way we do because they’re operating from the start like owners of the business. In the early days, if we wanted to recruit the top people, we had to figure out how to distinguish ourselves — and this was one way of doing that.”

Associates at Boies Schiller work hard for the money — and so does David Boies. He’s now 76, with no need for more fame or fortune, but he continues to do what he does best: try cases.

Over his five-decade career, Boies has tried more than 85 cases, including ten where more than $1 billion was at stake. The high-profile Hank Greenberg trial, in which Boies defended the former CEO of AIG against civil accounting fraud charges, took place just last fall (and was settled in February for less than $10 million — a fraction of the $50 million sought by New York State, and a “nuisance settlement” in Boies’s view).

Given the demands of trial work, it’s hard to imagine a career as long as Boies’s. Boies told me about how a reporter covering the Microsoft case approached him and said, “My father watched your father try a case 25 years ago.” Boies, whose father was a teacher, said that couldn’t be right. The reporter said, “No, no, I remember what my dad said — it was this libel case against CBS.” Boies said, “That wasn’t my father….”

Indeed, the impressively modest, surprisingly soft-spoken Boies chalks up much of his success to sheer longevity: “When you do this as long as I’ve done it, if you did only two trials a year, that would be one hundred trials. A lot of things I’ve accomplished simply because I’ve stayed in the game as long as I have.”

Because of BSF’s growth, it’s no longer possible for David Boies to be involved (or potentially involved) in every matter at the firm. And it’s no longer the case that clients retain BSF with the hope or expectation that Boies himself will personally handle their matters (for example, trying a case if it doesn’t settle).

“For more than five years, I’ve been very selective in my cases,” Boies told me. “We have a whole firm of great trial lawyers, and a lot of the cases we have going on, important and fascinating cases, I’m not involved in at all.”

Karen Dunn

Karen Dunn

BSF represents several “new economy” companies like Uber and Airbnb; Boies has no personal connection to those cases. Oracle is a longtime firm client, but its last few trials were covered by other attorneys — longtime partners like Bill Isaacson, and young superstars like Karen Dunn (previously profiled in these pages). As Jonathan Schiller mentioned in his recent Forbes interview, BSF no longer relies on a small group of rainmakers; several dozen partners have significant client relationships and books of business.

The firm that started off as David Boies camped out in his wife’s office now boasts more than 300 lawyers — and continues to grow. In the first few months of 2017, the firm made notable lateral hires, including Dominic Roughton, who joined the international arbitration practice in London; Travis LeBlanc, former Chief of the Enforcement Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission; and Ann O’Leary, a top adviser to Hilary Clinton.[8]

In April, Boies Schiller Flexner expanded to Los Angeles by combining with Caldwell Leslie & Proctor, a leading litigation boutique. Integration is key when it comes to mergers, so David Boies and Jonathan Schiller recently visited BSF’s new L.A. offices, a bright, modern space on the 31st floor of Ernst & Young Plaza in downtown Los Angeles. While there, they met with a key client and led a workshop with their new colleagues — reflecting their belief that even in our technologically advanced age, there’s still value in spending shoe leather to meet people face to face.

Boies expects the firm to keep growing, at about three to five percent a year: “If you don’t grow, you stagnate. You can’t attract the very best young lawyers unless they see opportunities for themselves that are created by growth.”

These opportunities — to handle cutting-edge cases, to represent clients to the best of one’s ability, to advance the public good, to improve as a litigator — are what draw aspiring trial lawyers to Boies Schiller Flexner. Yes, the money’s nice too — but as I wrote years ago, in a piece about the culture at Cravath, Biglaw isn’t all about the benjamins.

That’s a sentiment that David Boies surely agrees with, even if his time at Cravath is two decades in the rearview mirror. He might have been an odd duck at a firm famous for consistency and even conformity (look up the “Cravath walk”), but he does share his former firm’s commitment to excellence in lawyering and client service, with money as just a byproduct.

“At this point in my career, I’m most interested in the cases and the clients,” Boies told me. “The finances take care of themselves.”

To tweak an old saying: you can take the Boies out of Cravath, but you can’t take the Cravath out of the Boies.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Sparks is most famous as the site where mob boss Paul Castellano was assassinated, but it has also been a top destination for Manhattan meat lovers for more than half a century.

[2] Caesar’s Palace? Don’t judge. This was 1997, before the Bellagio, Venetian, and Wynn, when Caesar’s was one of the finest establishments on the Las Vegas Strip. As for craps, it’s Boies’s favorite game because of its (relatively) good odds and lively, social environment. As he notes in Courting Justice, craps is a metaphor for litigation: “It is necessary to manage your exposure while taking risks. It is critical to be patient and not get carried away. Luck plays a key part. Every hand, short or long, eventually ends. And the result of every new roll, like the result of every new case, is independent of the last.”

[3] Boies later learned that Time Warner’s determination to oust Cravath as counsel to the Yankees came from Fay Vincent, a Time Warner board member and former baseball commissioner — former because he had been fired, at the behest of Steinbrenner and other team owners.

[4] As an associate at Wachtell Lipton, I belonged to a team representing Avon, a tenant in Solow’s flagship 9 West 57th building, in litigation against Solow. I still remember Boies showing up to argue summary judgment motions in his signature black sneakers.

Donald Flexner (by Boies Schiller Flexner)

Donald Flexner (via Boies Schiller Flexner)

[5] David Boies and Robert Silver worked closely together for the next 18 years — Boies referred to Silver, his right-hand man, as “my brain” — until Silver’s untimely passing in 2015, at the age of 58.

[6] Around two years after Jonathan Schiller’s arrival, acclaimed antitrust litigator Donald Flexner left Crowell & Moring to join Boies and Schiller, and the marquee was complete: Boies Schiller & Flexner. The firm now goes by Boies Schiller Flexner, having axed the ampersand earlier this year.

[7] Today Bill Issacson is one of BSF’s most prominent partners. In 2015, the American Lawyer named him its Litigator of the Year.

[8] Secretary Clinton’s loss was BSF’s gain. Had Clinton won, Ann O’Leary and Karen Dunn, another Clinton confidante (and also her debate coach), would almost certainly have joined the administration. Other leading liberal lawyers, such as Michael Gottlieb, might have returned to government service as well.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

Big Law’s Most Famous Practicing Lawyer is… [Big Law Business]
Case By Case: Attorney David Boies’s Passion for Wine [Wine Spectator]
To Avoid Conflict Over Yankees Suit, Lawyer Quits Firm [New York Times]
Why David Boies Left Cravath [Bloomberg Businessweek]
David Boies: Corporate America’s No. 1 hired gun [Fortune]
Bob Silver, the man David Boies called “my brain,” dead at 58 [Fortune]
Being There: David Boies’s First 50 Years In Court [Lawdragon]
How David Boies Became the Best Friend and Worst Enemy of Big Business [Bloomberg Businessweek]
The Legal Odds Are Shifting in the A.I.G. Case [New York Times]
v. Goliath: The Trials of David Boies [Amazon (affiliate link)]
Courting Justice [Amazon (affiliate link)]

Earlier Above the Law stories about David Boies and Boies Schiller Flexner:

DBL square headshotDavid Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.

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