David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

students, as they made notes and doodled
and faded in and out, missed things.
Their attention was compromised. Boies
didn’t have that problem. He might not
have been a reader, but the things he was
forced to do because he could not read
well turned out to be even more
valuable. He started out at Northwestern
Law School, then he transferred to Yale.
When Boies became a lawyer, he did
not choose to practice corporate law.
That would have been foolish.
Corporate lawyers need to work their
way through mountains of documents and
appreciate the significance of the minor
footnote on page 367. He became a
litigator, a job that required him to think
on his feet. He memorizes what he needs