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October 25 — October 31,2010 Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Etc. Hard Choices

David Boies "I didn't want the firm to lose its most important client, but I didn't want to abandon Steinbrenner.... By the following Tuesday, I resigned"

The star litigator on picking between

his clients and his firm, and striking out as an entrepreneur-at age 56 I

was representing the New York Yankees against Major League Baseball [in a dis- pute over sponsorship rights] in May 1997 when Time Warner-then the largest client of my law firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore- acquired Turner Broadcasting. Turner

owned the Atlanta Braves, and they didn't want their law firm representing the Yankees.

I had been at Cravath my entire career. At 561 had a multimillion-doUar-per-year income, total job secu- rity, and the best lawyers in the country on my cases. I didn't want the firm to lose its most important client, but I didn't want to abandon Steinbrenner. The issue was raised by Time Warner on a Friday. By the following Tuesday, I resigned. It was the only way I could be loyal to my firm and my client.

A few days after I left, there was an article about it in The New York Times. That morning, [real estate executive] Sheldon Solow, who had been a client at Cravath, called me and said, "Now you have two cli- ents." By the end of the day, I had Georgia-Pacific and DuPont, too. The first call I made was to a bril- liant lawyer named Bob Silver. Bob brought over an associate. My son Jonathan was graduating from law school, and I convinced him to come, too. By Thanks- giving, we knew this was going to be successful.

One thing that could have screwed it up would have been not spending enough time on client re- lationships. The hardest decisions are knowing what to take on. Most clients expect some partici- pation from me, and I'm careful in choosing what to do. There are a few factors: my availability, the nature and importance of the case, the significance of the client to the firm, and chemistry. If I'm going to spend a lot of time with them, they have to be people I want to work with.

Law firms either grow or decline. You must recruit the very, very best people. They won't come unless they can see a path to their own professional devel- opment. I would have been happy to see us settle at 150 lawyers. We have more than 240 lawyers now, and the firm still has to grow. It's a necessary evil to attract the best people. © —As told to Diane Brady

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