He won that case, but in 1997 Boies left Cravath after the firm refused to let him represent the New York Yankees in its antitrust suit against Major League Baseball. Cravath's longtime client Time Warner owns the Atlanta Braves, a defendant in the suit. Boies started his own firm, where three of his children are now among its 60 attorneys. He has burnished his reputation lately by breaking up an international vitamin cartel, being called in by a federal judge to handle a class action against Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses, and representing Napster in its fight against the record companies over copyright infringement. He has made his reputation not by showboating on Geraldo but by reducing complex litigation to understandable stories, which he tells in his flat Midwestern tone.
Boies likes the concrete.
Boies took special delight in his statistician, a Yale professor resembling Professor Irwin Corey, who pointed out that the undervote in counties that used punch cards was five times as high as that in counties that used other methods. But Boies has also shown uncharacteristic passion in the election battle. At a dinner squeezed in after The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and before Larry King, he orders a hamburger with absolutely nothing on it, a fetish of the unapologetic red-meat eater who doesn't want so much as a sprig of parsley between the bun and the burger. While he likes chilled Mumm champagne and gourmet cuisine on bike trips in Provence with his family, he can live for days on pretzels and Diet Coke. When he finds out the restaurant has his favorite dessert, chocolate ice cream, he digs into it with as much relish as if Miami-Dade had just started counting again.