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This is the way Boies seduces the crowd of reporters who follow him from case to case--by making himself, both his person and his arguments, utterly accessible, by never retreating into off-the-record sessions, by being so candid that reporters compete to see if they can ask a question that he won't answer, and by reveling in the byplay of late-night chats with the better-informed reporters, which allow him to test arguments he's thinking of using in court. "In some of these trials," Boies says, "the only other people who care as much about the case as I do are the opposing lawyers and the reporters who are covering it." Through those sometimes long evenings, Boies will surreptitiously drop a plastic stirrer into his jacket pocket as he lifts each Ketel One screwdriver. At any point, he can reach into his pocket, count the stirrers and know when he has had enough.
One day during the Microsoft trial, as a covey of reporters gathered around Boies, one of the chief opposing lawyers, John Warden, wandered by and cracked, "Ask him about his wine cellar." Warden might have suggested the reporters also ask about the gorgeous Georgian home that sits above those 8,000 bottles in Westchester County, N.Y., or about the 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 could take in $25 million. And as you might imagine, all partners at Boies' firm are not created equal.
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.