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 documents] does not mean the firm did not maintain confidentiality,” the judge wrote.
Yet Boies was still in business: while dismissing the claims against John, the judge in the California case had allowed many of the claims against Richard and Joe Fuisz to stand and the case to proceed to trial. John might no longer be a defendant, but Boies could still use the same narrative of collusion between father and son to argue his case against Richard and Joe.
As the litigation dragged on into the fall, John’s initial annoyance with the case morphed into full-blown fury at Elizabeth. After leaving McDermott, he had founded his own practice and the Theranos case and its allegations had cost him several clients. Opposing counsel had also brought them up to tar him in two of his cases. By the time Boies Schiller attorneys deposed John in the spring of 2013, his anger was made rawer by another source of stress: his wife, Amanda, had been diagnosed with a vasa previa, a complication of pregnancy in which the fetus’s blood vessels are exposed and at risk of rupture. She and John were in anxious limbo until the baby reached thirty-four weeks and doctors could deliver her and place her in the neonatal intensive care unit.
Even in the best of times, John had a short fuse. Growing up, he often got into fights with other boys. Under the questioning of one of Boies’s partners that day, he became combative and ornery, using foul language and letting his temper flare. At the end of the six-and-a-half-hour deposition, he made a threat that played right into Boies’s hands. Asked by one of his father’s lawyers whether the case had caused him reputational harm and, if so, whether that had affected his demeanor during the deposition, he responded:
Absolutely, I am more than pissed off at these people. I intend to seek my revenge and sue the fuck out of them when this is over, and you can guarantee I will not let Elizabeth Holmes have another fucking company as long as she lives. I will use my ability to file patents and fuck with her till she dies, absolutely.
While John Fuisz’s anger was boiling over, his father and brother were becoming concerned with how expensive the litigation was getting. They had hired the Los Angeles law firm Kendall Brill & Klieger to represent them at a cost of about $150,000 a month. Laura Brill, the partner who was handling their case, wanted to file an anti-SLAPP motion to try to get the Theranos suit thrown out as frivolous, which would have cost an additional $500,000 with little assurance that it would succeed. They decided to switch to a smaller and less expensive Northern California firm called Banie & Ishimoto and hired the George Washington University Law School professor Stephen Saltzburg, who had done legal work for Fuisz in the past, to oversee its work.
On the other