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

construction. “It was outside work, with older guys,” Boies remembers. “I was making more money than I could ever have imagined. It was a lot of fun.” After that, he worked for a while as a bookkeeper in a bank while playing a lot of bridge on the side. “It was a great life. I could have gone on like that for a while. But after our first child was born, my wife became increasingly serious-minded about my future.” She brought home brochures and pamphlets from local colleges and universities. He remembered a childhood fascination with the law and decided that he would go to law school. Today David Boies is one of the most famous trial lawyers in the world.
    How Boies went from a construction worker with a high school education to the top of the legal profession is a puzzle, to say the least. The law is built around reading—around cases and opinions and scholarly analyses—and Boies is someone for whom reading is a struggle. It seems crazy that he would even have considered the law. But let’s not forget that if you are reading this book, then you are a reader—and that means you’ve probably never had to think of all the shortcuts and strategies and bypasses that exist to get around reading.
    Boies started college at the University of Redlands, a small private university an hour east of Los Angeles. Going there was his first break. Redlands was a Small Pond. Boies excelled there. He worked hard and was very well organized—because he knew he had to be. Then he got lucky. Redlands required a number of core courses for graduation, all of which involved heavy reading requirements. In those years, however, one could apply to law school without completing an undergraduate degree. Boies simply skipped the core courses. “I remember when I found out I could go to law school without graduating,” he says. “It was so great. I couldn’t believe it.”
    Law school, of course, required even more reading. But Boies discovered that there were summaries of the major cases—guides that would boil down the key point of a long Supreme Court opinion to a page or so. “People might tell you that’s an undesirable way to do law school,” he says. “But it was functional.” Plus, he was a good listener. “Listening,” he says, “is something I’ve been doing essentially all my life. I learned to do it because that was the only way that I could learn. I remember what people say. I remember words they use.” So he would sit in class at law school—while everyone else furiously made notes or doodled or lapsed into daydreams or faded in and out—focusing on what was said and committing what he heard to memory. His memory by that point was a formidable instrument. He had been exercising it, after all, ever since his mother read to him as a child and he memorized what she said. His fellow 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 to say. Sometimes in court he stumbles when he has to read something and comes across a word that he cannot process in time. So he stops and spells it out, like a child in a spelling bee. It’s awkward. It’s more of an eccentricity, though, than an actual problem. In the 1990s, he headed the prosecution team accusing Microsoft of antitrust violations, and during the trial, he kept referring to “login” as “lojin,” which is just the kind of mistake a dyslexic makes. But he was devastating in the cross-examination of witnesses, because there was no nuance, no subtle evasion, no peculiar and telling choice of words that he would miss—and no stray comment or revealing admission from testimony an hour or a day or a week before that he would not have heard, registered, and remembered.
    “If I could read a lot faster, it would make a lot of things that I do easier,” Boies said. “There’s no doubt about that. But on the other hand, not