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His other great skills include an extraordinary ability to take complex issues and present them simply, and the capacity in cross-examination to go in whichever direction the witness requires. Jeff Blattner, a Deputy Assistant Attorney General who worked with him on the Microsoft case, calls Boies' ability to improvise in the courtroom "pure jazz." During that trial, when a frustrated Microsoft witness complained that Boies was ambushing him with trick questions, Boies actually promised to raise his hand before he asked another one. And there you see it in the trial transcript, five questions later, following a seemingly innocuous query: "[Counsel raises hand.]" And just 10 lines after that, the bleeding witness is retracting the substance of his sworn deposition. This is more than jazz; this is theater with scenery, lights and full orchestra.
Or maybe it's just another version of a stunt he pulled during a college game of bridge. "David was sitting opposite the dummy," classmate Richard West recalls. "He arranged his cards in his hand, put them facedown on the table and then played them out one by one, as if he knew exactly how my partner and I were going to play the hand. It sort of destroyed our focus."
Boies met Mary McInnis, his third wife, when she was a lawyer on the White House staff in the late '70s and he was taking a sabbatical from Cravath to work with the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee--and, not incidentally, had been divorced from his second wife for five years and was ready for a little order in his life. "It took me about 12 minutes to fall in love with him," she says. "He was smart, good-looking, unmarried--what could be wrong?"
A neighbor in Scarsdale, N.Y., where Boies lived at the time, remembers Boies and his teenage son David III living together in an enormous house, playing host to an awful lot of poker games, never unpacking the groceries they brought home and never straightening the place up. Every few months, they would call a cleaning service and move into a hotel while the house was brought back to some level of normal sanitation. This was during the Cravath years (if only they'd known!), when Boies was making his reputation and law was his life.
This, however, is the way Boies lives today: with Mary and their two teenage children in a long and lovely red-brick mansion that seems as if it has been transplanted from the Virginia Tidewater, poised on a small rise overlooking the undulant comfort of upper Westchester's gentrified farmland. He lives on airplanes that take him to trials all over the country, bring him home for a son's football game or a daughter's school event and then shuttle him back again. He travels each summer on cross-country Jeep trips with some of his six kids, or on available weekends to Vegas or Atlantic City with his wife, some friends, maybe some of his older kids, to hold down his end of a craps table.
Of course, he works too. When he got back to his New York office the day the Supreme Court decided against him, in town for the first time in nearly a month, Boies greeted his partners, picked up the phone and joined a conference call with client Calvin Klein, then another with developer Sheldon Solow. Taking advantage of the time difference, he made a third to the West Coast to talk about a Napster matter. "It's always a workday someplace," he said, almost exhilarated.