OT One thing about our economy in the service area of law we reign supreme.
Lawyer who levelled Gates aims for Bush
FROM BEN MACINTYRE IN WASHINGTON
AL GORE’S latest legal weapon in the mêlée of electoral litigation is a rumpled, softspoken figure who wears cheap suits and $10 ties and delights in putting the boot into big corporations, the Establishment, and now the George W. Bush campaign.
David Boies, the lawyer who humbled Bill Gates in the Microsoft anti-trust case, has been recruited to head Mr Gore’s legal team, bringing with him a reputation as a ferocious trial lawyer.
Mr Boies, 59, made his first appearance in the politicallegal drama this week with a shuffle, a grin, and a bald threat. If Florida’s Secretary of State refused to accept the results of manual recounts without good reason, he said, “then we will all be back in court”.
If the Bush camp recalls what happened to Mr Gates, then the Republicans have good reason to view that prospect with trepidation.
William Kovacic of George Washington University Law School said: “David Boies is the person you hire when you are really, really serious about doing battle in a courtroom.”
In the past the folksy Midwestern lawyer with the photographic memory has represented the Internet song-swap company Napster, IBM and the New York Yankees baseball team. Among his courtroom victories are a $1.7 billion (£1.2 billion) settlement wrung from seven of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, the $512 million settlement in the class action suit against Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and the successful defence of CBS in a $120 million libel suit brought by General William Westmoreland.
But his greatest triumph, the one that turned him into “David the giant-killer”, was his trouncing of Microsoft. When Mr Gates made his deposition, Mr Boies repeatedly wrong-footed him, challenging the Microsoft chairman on e-mails and memos that gradually built up a devastating case against the software company.
Earlier this year a judge ruled that Microsoft was indeed a monopoly, following Mr Boies’s line of argument almost to the letter. The case is now under appeal.
Simplicity lies at the core of the Boies strategy. Mr Boies, who commands fees of $700 an hour, has already demonstrated that technique in Florida, by simplifying a legalistic tangle into a few crisp phrases.
“The more complicated it is, the more important it is to define what the simple truths are,” Mr Boies said recently. Within minutes of Tuesday’s ambiguous court ruling on the deadline for hand counts, Mr Boies was in front of the cameras, extracting the nugget of advantage to Mr Gore from an otherwise disappointing verdict. A dyslexic who could not read until he was eight, Mr Boies wears training shoes to court, eats T-bone steak and chocolate ice cream on special occasions, and wears his watch over his shirt sleeve so he can tell the time without raising his cuff.
Of his last 45 major cases, he has lost only one.
But Mr Boies faces some hefty opposition in Florida. Ranged on the Republican side are heavy-hitters such as Theodore Olson, the former Assistant Attorney-General under President Reagan, Barry Richard, one of the top constitutional lawyers in Florida, and Ben Ginsberg, the legal mastermind behind Mr Bush’s record-breaking fund-raising.
Mr Olson put on a resonating performance earlier this week, after a federal court rejected a Bush plea to stop manual recounts: “If the chaotic, unreliable, and capricious manual recount process is allowed to continue,” he thundered, “then partisan officials in four counties in one state will pick the next President of the United States.”
In the Gore corner, Mr Boies is backed by Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law professor, and Kendall Coffey, the former US Attorney in Miami. On the fringes of the legal battle, but as ever securely in the limelight, is Alan Dershowitz, Harvard’s flamboyant law professor and sometime novelist, who is representing Florida voters demanding a revote.
The most expensive election in history is now set to end in a flurry of record legal bills. |
