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Joel Klein, former Assistant Attorney General for antitrust, hired Boies to litigate the government's case against Microsoft--despite the fact that he doesn't use a computer, not even for e-mail--because he believed Boies to be the best litigator in the country. Boies famously reduced Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, in a 20-hour deposition, to a hemming and hawing puddle, quibbling over the meaning of "concern" and "compete." How was Boies able to recall in court the exact wording of messages sent from one Microsoft executive to another? How did he keep every section of Florida's election code, down to the last subsection, straight in his head? No one really knows. Yale Law School professor emeritus Guido Calabresi remembers when Boies transferred from Northwestern University's law school (he was kicked out for having an affair with a professor's wife, who became the second of Boies' three wives): "He arrived speaking in original, thoughtful, fully formed paragraphs. He knew exactly what he was doing. Absolutely brilliant is not an exaggeration."
But quirky. At morning meetings during the Microsoft trial, Boies would arrive with a bag of bagels and eat only the insides of each, leaving the crusts piled on his plate--"as if a four-year-old had just had breakfast," recalls Klein. One of the youngest people ever made partner (at age 31) at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, Boies became famous for successfully defending IBM against a massive antitrust suit. In another high-profile case, in the early 1980s, he defended CBS against General William Westmoreland's libel suit. Boies was so impressive that reporters took to humming the theme from Jaws whenever he rose to cross-examine a witness. Westmoreland, who dropped his claim, told Vanity Fair that he wouldn't have given up if he'd "had one [lawyer] like Boies." A few days before Thanksgiving 14 years ago, Boies was drafted to handle Texaco's appeal of a $10.6 billion judgment for interfering in Pennzoil's acquisition of Getty Oil. He devoured 30,000 pages of trial transcript between visits to the bedside of his mother, who was dying of brain cancer.
He won that case, but in 1997 Boies left Cravath after the firm refused to let him represent the New York Yankees in its antitrust suit against Major League Baseball. Cravath's longtime client Time Warner owns the Atlanta Braves, a defendant in the suit. Boies started his own firm, where three of his children are now among its 60 attorneys. He has burnished his reputation lately by breaking up an international vitamin cartel, being called in by a federal judge to handle a class action against Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses, and representing Napster in its fight against the record companies over copyright infringement.