courier between his father and a college friend who worked at the law
firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. The college friend had
given John a stack of Skadden billing documents to pass on to his dad.
At the time, Richard Fuisz was in a legal battle with a Skadden client,
the heavy-equipment maker Terex Corporation, which had sued him
for libel for telling a congressional committee that it sold Scud missile
launchers to Iraq. Even though the incident was twenty years old and
the libel suit had been settled without any court finding that John had
done anything wrong, Boies intended to use it to suggest he had a
history of funneling stolen information to his father.
There was something else Boies planned to exploit that was both
more recent and potentially more damaging: McDermott had forced
John to resign in 2009 after he clashed with the firm’s brass in an
unrelated matter. The cause of the dispute had been John’s insistence
that the firm withdraw its reliance on a forged document in a case
before the International Trade Commission in which McDermott was
representing a Chinese state-owned company against the U.S.
government’s Office of Unfair Import Investigations. McDermott’s
leadership had agreed to withdraw the document, but the move had
severely weakened the Chinese client’s defense and angered the firm’s
senior partners. The firm had subsequently asked John to leave, citing
a list of other incidents that it said showed a pattern of behavior
unbecoming of a partner. One of the reasons cited was a complaint a
client had made about John. At the time, the firm had refused to tell
John who the client was or what the complaint was about, but he now
figured it must have been Elizabeth’s September 2008 complaint to
Chuck Work about his father’s patent.
Boies’s strategy of painting John Fuisz in a bad light was dealt a
setback in June 2012 when the judge overseeing the case dismissed all
the claims against John on the grounds that California’s one-year
statute of limitations for legal malpractice had expired. Boies turned
around and sued McDermott in state court in Washington, D.C., but
that suit was soon dismissed when the court ruled that Theranos’s
allegations against John and the firm were completely speculative.
“Simply because attorneys within the firm had access [to the Theranos