father was an overbearing megalomaniac and tried to keep their
interactions to a bare minimum. In 2004, he’d even dropped him as a
McDermott client because he was being difficult and slow to pay his
bills. The notion that John had willingly jeopardized his legal career to
steal information for his father betrayed a fundamental
misunderstanding of their frosty relationship.
But Elizabeth was understandably furious at Richard Fuisz. The
patent application he had filed in April 2006 had matured into U.S.
Patent 7,824,612 in November 2010 and now stood in the way of her
vision of putting the Theranos device in people’s homes. If that vision
was someday realized, she would have to license the bar code
mechanism Fuisz had thought up to alert doctors to patients’
abnormal blood-test results. Fuisz had rubbed that fact in her face the
day his patent was issued by sending a Fuisz Pharma press release to
[email protected], the email address the company provided on its
website for general queries. Rather than give in to what she saw as
blackmail, Elizabeth had decided to steamroll her old neighbor by
hiring one of the country’s best and most feared attorneys to go after
him.
—
DAVID BOIES’S LEGEND preceded him. He had risen to national
prominence in the 1990s when the Justice Department hired him to
handle its antitrust suit against Microsoft. On his way to a resounding
courtroom victory, Boies had grilled Bill Gates for twenty hours in a
videotaped deposition that proved devastating to the software giant’s
defense. He had gone on to represent Al Gore before the Supreme
Court during the contested 2000 presidential election, cementing his
status as a legal celebrity. More recently, he’d successfully led the
charge to overturn Proposition 8, California’s ban on gay marriage.
Boies was a master litigator who could be ruthless when he felt the
situation required it. In one case that illustrated his no-holds-barred
ethos, he had escalated a business dispute between a client and the
owner of a small Palm Beach lawn-care company into a federal