David Boies Biography

David Boies is an American lawyer and chairman of the law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner. He rose to national prominence for three major cases: leading the U.S. federal government’s successful prosecution of Microsoft in United States v. Microsoft Corp., his representation of Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in Bush v. Gore, and for successful representing of the plaintiff in Hollingsworth v. Perry, which invalidated California Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage.

He has also defended numerous other high-profile clients in the United States, including Theranos, tobacco companies, and Harvey Weinstein.

David Boies Age

David Boies was born in Sycamore, Illinois, U.S. on March 11, 1941. He is 78 years as of 2019.

David Boies Wife

He married Mary Boies in 1982.

David Boies Net Worth

David has an estimated net worth of $20 million.

David Boies Background and education

Boies was born in Sycamore, Illinois, to two teachers, and raised in a farming community. He has four siblings. His first job was when he was 10 years old—a paper route with 120 customers. Boies has dyslexia and he did not learn to read until the third grade.

Writer Malcolm Gladwell has portrayed the one of a kind procedures of perusing and learning Boies experienced because of his dyslexia. Boies’ mom, for example, would peruse stories to him when he was a tyke and Boies would remember them since he couldn’t pursue the words on the page.

In 1954, the family moved to California. Boies moved on from Fullerton Union High School in Fullerton, California.

Boies went to the University of Redlands from 1960–62, got a B.S. degree from Northwestern University in 1964, a J.D. degree magna cum laude from Yale Law School in 1966 and an LL.M. degree from New York University School of Law 1967; he was granted a privileged LL.D. from the University of Redlands in 2000.

He as of now serves on the Board of Trustees of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, which is an exhibition hall devoted to the U.S. Constitution.

David Boies Professional Career

Law firm

Boies was a lawyer at Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, where he began upon graduate school graduation in 1966 and turned into an accomplice in 1973. He left Cravath in 1997 when a noteworthy customer protested his portrayal of the New York Yankees despite the fact that the firm itself had discovered no conflict.

He left the firm inside 48 hours of being educated regarding the customer’s complaint and made his very own firm, presently known as Boies, Schiller and Flexner LLP. It is as of now appraised 23rd in “generally speaking notoriety” and fifteenth among New York law offices by Vault.com, a site on legitimate vocation data.

Notable cases

• Boies lost the first important file-sharing case which ultimately put Napster into bankruptcy.
• At Cravath, he represented the Justice Department in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. case. Boies won a “victory” at trial, and the verdict was upheld on appeal. The appellate court overturned the relief ordered (breakup of the company) back to the trial court for further proceedings. Thereafter, the George W. Bush administration settled the case. Bill Gates said Boies was “out to destroy Microsoft”. In 2001, the Washington Monthly called Boies “a brilliant trial lawyer”, “a latter-day Clarence Darrow”, and “a mad genius” for his work on the Microsoft case.
• Also at Cravath, Boies defended CBS in the libel suit Westmoreland v. CBS from 1984-5, but after dragging on for 2 years, the case was dropped.
• Following the 2000 U.S. presidential election, he represented Vice President Al Gore in Bush v. Gore. In Jay Roach’s Recount, which focuses on the case, Boies is played by Ed Begley Jr.
• In 2006, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP negotiated a major settlement with The American International Group on behalf of its client, C. V. Starr, a firm controlled by Maurice R. Greenberg, the former chairman and chief executive of A.I.G. In 2015 Boies won at trial a claim that the government’s $85 billion bailouts of AIG had been unfair to the company’s owners. Boies has appealed, asking for greater monetary damages.
• Boies negotiated on behalf of American Express two of the highest civil antitrust settlements ever for an individual company: $2.25 billion from Visa, and $1.8 billion from MasterCard.
• Boies is representing filmmaker Michael Moore regarding a Treasury Department investigation into Moore’s trip to Cuba while filming for Sicko.
• On June 24, 2009, following the California Supreme Court ruling on Strauss v. Horton, Boies joined former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, the opposing attorney in Bush v. Gore, in the lawsuit Perry v. Brown seeking to overturn the state of California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage. In August 2010, the District Court judge ruled in their clients’ favor, finding Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional. On June 26, 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the proponents of Proposition 8 did not have the standing to challenge the ruling, allowing the District Court judgment to stand. Same-sex marriages resumed in California on June 28, 2013.
• Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP assisted the government in obtaining a $155 million settlement from Medco Health Solutions related to a qui tam complaint which alleged that Medco helped some pharmaceutical companies make more money by driving prescriptions to them; along with making the payment Medco also signed a corporate integrity agreement.
• On August 20, 2009, the Golden Gate Yacht Club announced that he had been retained in their ongoing dispute with Société Nautique de Genèveregarding the 33rd America’s Cup.
• In March 2010, Boies joined the team of attorneys representing Jamie McCourt in her divorce from Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt.
• Boies was part of the legal team representing the National Football League in their antitrust litigation, Brady v. NFL.
• Boies represented the National Basketball Players Association during the 2011 NBA lockout. He joined sides with Jeffrey Kessler, who opposed Boies as a representative for the players in the 2011 NFL lockout.
• Boies was the lead counsel for Oracle Corporation in its lawsuit against Google on the use of Java programming language technology in the Android operating system. The case decided that Google did not infringe on Oracle’s patents.
• In 2012, Boies represented three tobacco companies, Philip Morris USA Inc., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., and Liggett Group LLC, in their appeal of a $2.5 million Tampa jury verdict in the death of smoker Charlotte Douglas.
• In late 2012, Boies defended Gary Jackson, former president of Academi(previously known as BlackWater), in a federal prosecution which alleged he and his co-defendants illegally hid firearm purchases from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
• In 2015, Boies represented Harvey Weinstein in renegotiating Weinstein’s employment contract.
• In February 2016, Boies agreed to both sit on the board of directors and act as the attorney for troubled Silicon Valley startup Theranos. The controversial dual role was deemed difficult as he would have to represent both the company (as a lawyer) and investors (as a director).
• In 2017, Boies agreed to join the legal team for Lawrence Lessig’s legal fight against winner-take-all Electoral College vote allocations in the states.
• Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones hired Boies in 2017 to advise on Jones’s legal strategy against NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the NFL compensation committee in the wake of the suspension of running back Ezekiel Elliott.

David Boies Criticism

In his 2001 book, prosecutor and author Vincent Bugliosi criticized Boies’ abilities as a trial lawyer, arguing that Boies “wasn’t forceful or eloquent at all in making his points” in Bush v. Gore. “Although he seemed to have a very good grasp of the facts, he seemed completely incapable of drawing powerful, irresistible inferences from those facts that painted his opposition into a corner”.

In 2017, Boies’ firm supposedly guided private insight organization Black Cube to keep an eye on supposed casualties of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual maltreatment and on journalists who were exploring Weinstein’s actions.

Over the course of a year, Weinstein had Black Cube and different offices “target,” or gather data on, many people, and arrange mental profiles that occasionally focussed on their own or sexual accounts.” A couple of days after the fact, The New York Times reported it had “ended its relationship” with Boies’ firm.

As per The Wall Street Journal, Boies arranged Harvey Weinstein’s agreement without saying to Weinstein Co. chiefs he had interest in the organization’s movies.

Boies includes conspicuously in Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, a true to life book by Wall Street Journal insightful correspondent John Carreyrou about extortion at the blood-testing organization Theranos.