David Boies was anchoring.
That’s how Benedict Hur, a lawyer for Google, described it earlier this week to a jury in San Francisco federal court. During Boies’s closing argument in the class action lawsuit brought against the tech giant claiming the company illegally collected information from apps of almost 100 million people, he threw out “a really big number” ($31 billion in damages) that had the effect of making “the smaller numbers look reasonable,” Hur explained to the panel.
It was true that in Boies’s close he rather casually asked the jury to award that eleven digit payout even though, at the start of the case, he asked for $29 billion. “He’s tacked on two billion dollars in the last two weeks,” Hur said. “At this rate, what’s it going to be next week?”
Hur called the damages request “outrageous,” and asked the jury, “Can I trust anything this lawyer says?”
People (jurors, judges, journalists) do trust what David Boies says. Now 84, Boies is perhaps the best known attorney in the world. He may also be the most respected.
In 1998, he argued the government’s antitrust case in United States v. Microsoft Corp.; he argued before the US Supreme Court on behalf of former Vice President Al Gore in Bush v. Gore; he argued to overturn Proposition 8 with 2009’s Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the case that ultimately led to legalized gay marriage nationwide in 2015.
More recently, Boies’s firm, Boies Schiller Flexner LLP teamed up with Edwards Henderson Lehrman on behalf of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein to secure $365 million in settlements from JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. Anyone with a six decade-long career also takes on less sympathetic clients from time to time, as Boies has with Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. And yet, Boies’s reputation — and much of his press — has remained positive.
Seeing him standing before the jury in the Phillip Burton Federal Building at Golden Gate Ave. and Polk, there was no doubt that the famed lawyer is a physically diminished version of the man who grilled Bill Gates for 20 hours. Boies is grayer; his frame is slight as he walks the hallways in a pair of black mesh laceless sneakers. He is also quieter. At the Google trial, the court reporter grew so frustrated trying to pick up his voice, she interrupted his argument to move the microphone closer to his mouth. Some of his sentences trail off into a murmur, yet he can still land a quick counterpunch.
“Don’t believe anything I say,” Boies told the jury in rebuttal to Hur’s “anchoring” line. The case isn’t about the lawyers or the arguments, he said: “Believe what the evidence says.”
They must’ve believed the evidence. On Wednesday the jury quickly returned a verdict: Google is liable for $425 million. (Google is appealing the decision.)
Occasionally burnishing of his reputation, Boies was slightly less voluble when it came to two clients I was most interested in: Holmes and Weinstein.
A week before closing arguments, I met with Boies at the Ritz Carlton in Nob Hill, where he was staying during the trial. A man who identified himself as Boies’s security guard led me to where the lawyer was waiting with his menu open. When I told Boies that I preferred not to eat during an interview, he closed the menu, saying he didn’t want anything if I wasn’t eating.
In 2023, Reuters listed Boies’s hourly fee at $2,110. As we talked over the next two hours — eventually we did order a single screwdriver each — I was mindful that I was spending valuable time with one the priciest legal minds in the world for free.
The conversation felt like Boies’s closing arguments on his life’s work. Occasionally burnishing of his reputation, he was slightly less voluble when it came to two clients I was most interested in: Holmes and Weinstein. He didn’t shy away from my questions, but he didn’t answer every one. At times he spoke haltingly, taking pauses to formulate his answers, possibly imagining how they might be read in a transcription like one of his famous cross-examinations.
I never doubted that he was telling the truth, but I also couldn’t help but feel that he was choosing the words and facts that made the best case. At times, I wondered if I was being persuaded by a master litigator.
That’s not to say there wasn’t the occasional strategic flash of unguardedness, as when he talked about the Supreme Court and President Trump.
“I thought it was very undesirable for Trump not to concede, like every other unsuccessful candidate has done for a century,” Boies said of the president’s 2020 electoral loss. When I shared with him the breaking news that federal agents had raided the home of John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, he described Trump’s investigating political opponents as “severely misguided.”
Boies thinks the criminal cases brought against Trump were a mistake, especially his conviction in Manhattan, but also the indictments in Georgia, Florida, and the District of Columbia. These turned the President into a martyr, he said.
But he maintains that the Supreme Court will ultimately hold Trump accountable. He admitted to being concerned about the court abandoning stare decisis, which, translated from Latin means “to stand by things decided.” It’s the foundational idea that courts must abide by legal precedents.
The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade is a prime example of this. Yet Boies is convinced the court won’t overturn future election results.
“This is a court that I’ve got a lot of confidence in when it comes down to basic issues of rule of law, and our constitutional principles,” he said.
But even if the highest court did stand by the Constitution, would this president abide by their decision? It’s worth remembering that the Trump administration is still trying to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia even after the Supreme Court ruled his deportation to El Salvador was illegal.
“I’m a really good listener, and I learn a lot that way.”
David Boies
Boies spends the warmer months of the year at his home in Armonk, New York, and the colder months at a second home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but he also maintains ties to the Bay Area. In 1990 he bought a 1,300 acre ranch in Lake county, 100 miles north of San Francisco, which is home to Hawk and Horse Vineyards. He comes here regularly for work.
Boies is dyslexic, a slow reader and writer. When I suggested to him that those qualities don’t lend themselves to being a good lawyer, he countered that he has a very good memory, quickly noting that reports of it being photographic are overstated. One of his great strengths is listening: “I’m a really good listener, and I learn a lot that way,” he told me.
Boies demonstrated this as we talked. When I asked him a question, he sat completely still, patiently absorbed. The effect was calming and not a little bit disarming. But then, I wasn’t on the witness stand: I was the one asking the questions — and I hadn’t asked about Weinstein and Holmes yet.
Boies’s talent for listening comes through in his stock-in-trade: examining and cross-examining witnesses. According to Vaughn Walker, a former chief judge of the San Francisco federal courthouse who oversaw Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Boies has an instinctive understanding of the “yin and yang of what goes on in a trial courtroom… It’s unusual to have a skill that refined.”
In 2011, Boies started representing Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. His firm worked with the startup founder as she rose to Silicon Valley stardom; he continued to represent her — even serving on Theranos’s board — after credible allegations of fraud were raised. Holmes was convicted in January 2022 of lying to investors and is serving an 11 year sentence in Texas.
As a legal reporter, I covered every part of Holmes’s criminal prosecution, from her indictment to sentencing. In those years I grew intimately familiar with her false claims that, like a magic hat, Theranos’s black device could produce test results for hundreds of medical conditions from a single drop of blood. With the benefit of hindsight, one question has continued to gnaw at me: How did so many powerful people — from Boies to former Secretaries of State George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and others — fall for Holmes’s ruse for so many years?
Boies’s version of his role at Theranos began with his implausible explanation that “the major thing” he did for the company was an intellectual property suit he filed in 2011. That description is at odds with his extensive role at the company detailed in court filings and in Bad Blood, John Carreyrou’s 2018 book. Carreyrou, a former Wall Street Journal Reporter, described the efforts by Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, to intimidate and silence Theranos employees who wanted to speak out about the wrongdoing they witnessed. One of them, Erika Cheung, was the prosecution’s lead witness at Holmes’s criminal trial.
Boies even joined the company’s board of directors after the Journal started publishing damning stories about Theranos and Holmes, the first of which Boies personally tried to quash. He didn’t sever his ties with Holmes and Theranos until 2016.
Boies grew testy as I asked about this. Holmes’s fraud, he said, wasn’t as obvious as it looks now. The Food and Drug Administration approved one of Theranos’s blood tests, and medical experts served as company directors, on an advisory board, and at a facility in Newark, California. “You say it was obvious — it wasn’t obvious to them,” Boies told me.
Did he perhaps hang on with Theranos for so long because Holmes lied to him, too?
“I’m not going to say anything critical about a former client,” he told me, citing his professional obligation to clients, even ones found guilty and currently serving time. Boies did not represent Holmes in her fraud case, and said that if he had, “I would have defended it very differently.”
Clearly, Theranos is one client he hasn’t let go of yet.
Another client Boies may have difficulty separating himself from — mostly because the reporting about it is so voluminous and draped with prizes — is Harvey Weinstein. In 2017, journalist Ronan Farrow wrote a series of stories for the New Yorker revealing the producer and studio head’s long history of sexual abuse. (The New York Times was also on the case; both newsrooms won Pulitzer prizes for their efforts.) One of the articles showed that Boies contracted with Black Cube, an Israeli investigative company, as part of Weinstein’s campaign to suppress allegations of rape and assault. (Weinstein is currently in jail awaiting a retrial.)
Boies told me that he didn’t represent Weinstein “in a significant way.” His firm’s work for Weinstein was mostly concerned with resolving a contractual dispute with Black Cube. Over a period of about two years, Boies said, he billed for approximately 22 hours before he stopped representing Weinstein.
It’s worth noting that Boies also didn’t represent Weinstein at trial (that was Donna Rotunno), but his name is still linked to the case thanks to Farrow’s New Yorker work and Catch and Kill, the 2019 book that resulted from it. “After the facts come out, you know, after these allegations are demonstrated to have some currency, you’d always rather not be involved in that,” Boies said.
Though my questions were hardly the first time Boies had been asked to confront this part of his career, I got the sense that enough time had passed that he might be willing to answer them more candidly. Did Boies regret his involvement with either Holmes or Weinstein, I wondered?
“Well, I think that it depends what you mean by regret,” Boies said, sounding very much like a litigator. “I think that in terms of what I did, I don't have any regrets about that. I think if, when you started representing a client, [you knew] what all the facts would be, you would often decide not to do it. But you can't know that at the beginning, and once you start representing the client, you don't have the option of abandoning them in the middle of the case, unless, as was the case in these cases, they simply did not take your advice.”
Boies insists the Theranos and Weinstein chapters of his career never hurt his reputation where it counts most: with judges, juries, and clients. In the period following the prosecution of his former clients, and all the press they garnered, Boies said he was appointed lead counsel in more class actions than he had been before the negative publicity.
As Boies was representing clients that grew to be infamous and damned, starting in 2014, he started serving as the lawyer for victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking. Besides years of pro bono work in civil and criminal cases, he also negotiated the $365 million settlement with the banks. (The two law firms collected fees of $109.5 from that total.)
Boies said when his firm started representing Epstein’s victims, the disgraced financier and his co-conspirator, Ghislane Maxwell, “were seemingly immune” even though the trafficking was widely known. “There was no prosecution, there were no civil suits, there were no newspapers reporting on him,” Boies said. He also represented the late Virginia Giuffre in criminal and civil cases against Epstein and Maxwell, and in a civil case against Prince Andrew who settled for an undisclosed sum.
“I think we all really made a real difference in terms of bringing Maxwell and Epstein to justice, and getting some justice for the victims, although many, many people have never been held accountable,” Boies said.
Boies was deeply involved in the Google trial, not just a ringer brought in for opening and closing arguments. But the $425 million was a fraction of the damages he sought, and watching him in the courtroom it was difficult to understand why at this stage in his life he is expending the effort. Couldn’t other lawyers at his firm have done as well or better than Boies? I wondered if trial work had taken a toll on the once inexhaustible attorney whom Vanity Fair once dubbed “The Man Who Ate Microsoft” and New York Magazine unironically called a “superlawyer.”
“You do slow down, I think,” Boies told me, but being an older man also gave him something more valuable than youth. “On balance, I think that you’re probably as effective, maybe more effective, because you are more experienced,” Boies said.
“I think you’re more careful. I think being careful is very important in a trial, your credibility is critical,” he said. “The older you get, the more patient and careful you tend to be.”
I wasn’t a juror, but at that moment, I trusted what he said.
