a deal that gave Theranos everything it wanted before he’d had a chance to tell his side of the story in court. In his pique, John emailed a young reporter named Julia Love, who had been covering the case for American Lawyer Media, and told her about the quid pro quo Boies had sought the night before, making it sound like an attempt to bribe him. He also vowed to sue Boies and to add his father and brother to the suit as defendants. He then forwarded the email to Underhill and to Richard and Joe, letting them know that anything they sent his way would be forwarded to the media.
Underhill responded angrily a few hours later, leaving the reporter off his reply but copying his boss. He denied any attempt to bribe John and warned him that Boies Schiller would hold him responsible if he continued to make such claims. In case the message wasn’t clear, Boies himself chimed in from his iPad a few minutes later: Those who the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
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JULIA LOVE’S ARTICLE about the settlement in Litigation Daily, ALM’s newsletter, caught the eye of Roger Parloff, Fortune magazine’s legal correspondent. Parloff, who had once practiced law as a white-collar criminal defense attorney in Manhattan before becoming a journalist, was always on the lookout for legal sagas to write about.
This particular case struck him as strange and, in his experience, strange cases usually made for good yarns. Why had Boies, arguably the country’s most famous lawyer with his pick of high-profile cases to choose from, handled this obscure patent trial himself instead of delegating it to a more junior associate? Then there was the fact that John Fuisz, an attorney who was the son of one of the defendants and brother of the other, was publicly threatening to sue both the plaintiff and Boies for making false accusations.
From his office in the Time & Life Building in Midtown Manhattan, Parloff picked up the phone and called Dawn Schneider, Boies’s longtime public-relations representative. Parloff’s call was perfect timing from Schneider’s perspective. She had just talked to an ebullient Boies about the case and decided she should try to get him some press about it. She offered to come brief the Fortune writer in person. The Boies Schiller offices at Fifty-First Street and Lexington Avenue were just four avenue blocks away.
As she walked across Midtown, it occurred to Schneider that Boies’s victory in the Fuisz case was a good story but the far better story was Theranos and its brilliant young founder. She had never met Elizabeth, but she’d been hearing Boies rave about her for several years. This was an opportunity to get David’s protégée national attention just as her company prepared to expand across the country. By the time she got to the Fortune offices on Avenue of the Americas, Schneider had changed her pitch.
Parloff listened intrigued. He hadn’t seen the Wall Street Journal article from the previous fall so he had never heard of Theranos but, according to Schneider, that was precisely the point. It was like writing about Apple or Google in their early days before they became Silicon Valley icons and entered the collective consciousness.
“Roger, this is the greatest company you’ve never heard of,” she said. “Think of it as an old-school Fortune cover.”
A few weeks later, Parloff flew out to Palo Alto to meet Elizabeth. Over the course of several days, he interviewed her for a combined seven hours. After getting over his initial shock at her deep voice, he found her smart and engaging. When they broached topics other than blood testing, she was unassuming, almost naïve. But when their conversations shifted to Theranos, she became steely and intense. She was also very controlling with information. She dangled a scoop: Theranos had raised more than $400 million from investors at a valuation of $9 billion, making it one of the most valuable startups in Silicon Valley. And she showed Parloff the miniLab (though she didn’t refer to it by any name). But she wouldn’t let the magazine take photos of it and she didn’t want Parloff to use the words “device” or “machine” to describe it. She preferred “analyzer.”
Leaving those quirks aside, what Elizabeth told Parloff she’d achieved seemed genuinely innovative and impressive. As she and Sunny had stated to Partner Fund, she told him the Theranos analyzer could perform as many as seventy different blood tests from one tiny finger-stick draw and she