to a deal that gave Theranos everything it wanted before he’d had a
chance to tell his side of the story in court. In his pique, John emailed
a young reporter named Julia Love, who had been covering the case
for American Lawyer Media, and told her about the quid pro quo Boies
had sought the night before, making it sound like an attempt to bribe
him. He also vowed to sue Boies and to add his father and brother to
the suit as defendants. He then forwarded the email to Underhill and
to Richard and Joe, letting them know that anything they sent his way
would be forwarded to the media.
Underhill responded angrily a few hours later, leaving the reporter
off his reply but copying his boss. He denied any attempt to bribe John
and warned him that Boies Schiller would hold him responsible if he
continued to make such claims. In case the message wasn’t clear, Boies
himself chimed in from his iPad a few minutes later: Those who the
gods would destroy, they first make mad.
—
JULIA LOVE’S ARTICLE about the settlement in Litigation Daily, ALM’s
newsletter, caught the eye of Roger Parloff, Fortune magazine’s legal
correspondent. Parloff, who had once practiced law as a white-collar
criminal defense attorney in Manhattan before becoming a journalist,
was always on the lookout for legal sagas to write about.
This particular case struck him as strange and, in his experience,
strange cases usually made for good yarns. Why had Boies, arguably
the country’s most famous lawyer with his pick of high-profile cases to
choose from, handled this obscure patent trial himself instead of
delegating it to a more junior associate? Then there was the fact that
John Fuisz, an attorney who was the son of one of the defendants and
brother of the other, was publicly threatening to sue both the plaintiff
and Boies for making false accusations.
From his office in the Time & Life Building in Midtown Manhattan,
Parloff picked up the phone and called Dawn Schneider, Boies’s
longtime public-relations representative. Parloff’s call was perfect
timing from Schneider’s perspective. She had just talked to an