side, they knew they were up against one of the most expensive lawyers in the world. Boies charged clients nearly a thousand dollars an hour and was reputed to earn more than $10 million a year. What they didn’t know, however, was that in this instance he had accepted stock in lieu of his regular fees. Elizabeth had granted his firm 300,000 Theranos shares at a price of $15 a share, which put a sticker price of $4.5 million on Boies’s services.
It wasn’t the first time Boies had worked out an alternative fee arrangement with a client and taken stock for payment. During the dot-com boom, he had accepted shares to represent WebMD, the website that provides medical information to consumers. Boies had a venture capitalist’s approach to cases and figured he and his firm stood to earn a lot more money by getting paid in stock. But it also meant he had a vested financial interest in Theranos that made him more than just its legal advocate. It helped explain why, in early 2013, Boies began attending all of the company’s board meetings.
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EVEN THOUGH Elizabeth’s name was on all of Theranos’s patents, Richard Fuisz was highly skeptical that a college dropout with no medical or scientific training had done much real inventing. What was more likely, he thought, was that other employees with advanced degrees had done the work she’d patented.
As the two sides prepared for trial, Fuisz noticed one name that appeared as a co-inventor on many of Elizabeth’s patents: Ian Gibbons. With a little research, he learned a few basic facts about the man. Gibbons was a Brit who had a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, and he was credited as an inventor on some fifty U.S. patents, including nineteen stemming from his work at a company called Biotrack Laboratories in the 1980s and 1990s.
Fuisz presumed that Gibbons was a legitimate scientist and that, like most scientists, he was an honest person. If he could get him to admit under oath that there was nothing in his patent that borrowed from, or was similar to, Elizabeth’s early patent applications, it would deal a big blow to Theranos’s case. He and Joe had also noticed that some of Gibbons’s Biotrack patents were similar to the Theranos ones, opening the company up to charges that it had improperly recycled some of his past work. They added Gibbons’s name to the list of witnesses they wanted to depose. But then something strange happened: over the next five weeks, the Boies Schiller attorneys kept ignoring their request to schedule Gibbons’s deposition. Suspicious, the Fuiszes asked their lawyers to press the matter.
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Ian Gibbons
Ian Gibbons was the first experienced scientist Elizabeth had hired after launching Theranos. He came recommended by her Stanford mentor, Channing Robertson. Ian and Robertson had met at Biotrack in the 1980s, where they had invented and patented a new mechanism to dilute and mix liquid samples.
From 2005 to 2010, Ian led Theranos’s chemistry work alongside Gary Frenzel. Ian, who had joined the startup first, was initially senior to Gary. But Elizabeth soon inverted their roles because Gary had better people skills, which made him a smoother manager. The two of them cut quite a contrast—Ian, the reserved Englishman with a wry sense of humor, and Gary, the garrulous former rodeo rider who spoke with a Texas twang. But they had a good relationship grounded in their respect for each other as scientists and would sometimes roast each other in meetings.
Ian fit the stereotype of the nerdy scientist to a T. He wore a beard and glasses and hiked his pants high above his waist. He could spend hours on end analyzing data and took copious notes documenting everything he did at work. This meticulousness carried over to his leisure time: he was an avid reader and kept a list of every single book he’d read. It included Marcel Proust’s seven-volume opus, Remembrance of Things Past, which he reread more than once.
Ian and his wife, Rochelle, had met in the early 1970s at Berkeley. He had come over from England to do a postdoctorate fellowship in the university’s department of molecular biology, where Rochelle was doing her graduate research. They’d never had children, but Ian doted on their dogs Chloe and Lucy and on Livia, a cat he’d named after the wife of the Roman emperor Augustus.
Besides reading, Ian’s other two hobbies were going to the opera— he and Rochelle regularly