Word: cravath
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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...
...oceangoing yacht, the Northern California ranch, the high-stakes poker games, the nearly annual chateau-to-chateau bike trips in Burgundy and Bordeaux. If Boies doesn't dress in the usual plumage of a flamboyant trial lawyer, it's only because he doesn't care about clothes. Giving up Cravath and what Boies describes as "the guaranteed 2 1/2 million a year" only allowed him to make more...
Boies charges up to $750 an hour for his time and brings in far larger fees from plaintiffs' class actions--work in which the knives are long, the stakes are high and the fees higher. Firms like Cravath spurn suits like these, which run against the interests of their corporate clients. Firms like Boies, Schiller & Flexner, new enough to be free from such conflicts, do not. From last year's settlement of a case involving price fixing in the vitamin market, Boies, Schiller stands to collect a fee of $40 million; from this year's auction-house case, the firm...
Boies is free to pursue cases that can at worst be called loss leaders and at best be considered crusades. At Cravath, says Boies' friend and former partner Evan Chesler, "he couldn't help the Justice Department, and he couldn't represent the Vice President." Recruited for the Microsoft case by Justice antitrust chief Joel Klein after experts kept mentioning him to Klein, Boies charged the government only about $40 an hour. He handled the Gore case pro bono, after being recommended to the Vice President by a mutual friend, former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger...