Word: ways
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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This is the way David Boies conducts himself when the battle is at its hottest, when losses are mounting and the enemy is preparing for the kill: he sits upright with his gold-framed reading glasses halfway down his nose, a pen and document in hand, while his paralegal, only a few feet away, performs a circus act involving two cell phones, a briefcase and an importunate reporter. Boies' pen makes sharply slanting scratches on a critical legal brief--just one stone in a brutal, driving hail of critical briefs--that must be filed immediately on behalf of Vice President...
Lawyers are, in a way, the fathers of spin. They call it "vigorous representation of my client." The central distinction of spin--between knowingly lying and ignorantly or disingenuously misleading--is a positive ethical obligation of the legal profession. Lawyers are forbidden to do the former and required to do the latter as best they can. This includes what's known as "arguing in the alternative"--the practice, infuriating to lay people, of saying, "My client never stole the money, Your Honor, and anyway, he gave it all to charity...
This is the way David Boies, 59, conducts himself in the midst of the biggest case in a professional lifetime of huge cases, with the presidency teetering on the fulcrum of his arguments, with his back not to the wall but nearly through it. He acts as if he were waiting for tea to arrive. "Why should I worry?" he once asked his wife Mary, an accomplished lawyer, during another epic case several years ago. "Because I might lose? That's the worst thing that could happen...
...know Boies, these words, the phrasing, the syntax, give no clue to the setting where he is speaking. In court and out, he speaks a brand of English so simple and direct that he sounds like the high school teacher he once thought he would become. It's the way Boies speaks when addressing a judge, the way he speaks in his press conferences, the way he speaks over dinner. "Part of the reason he does so well," says ex-wife Judith Boies, also a lawyer, "is that's really him you're seeing in court...
This is the way Boies seduces the crowd of reporters who follow him from case to case--by making himself, both his person and his arguments, utterly accessible, by never retreating into off-the-record sessions, by being so candid that reporters compete to see if they can ask a question that he won't answer, and by reveling in the byplay of late-night chats with the better-informed reporters, which allow him to test arguments he's thinking of using in court. "In some of these trials," Boies says, "the only other people who care as much about...