David Boies: The first things you have to do when you take on a case is what every writer, every investigative reporter, every playwright has to do, and that is understand what the facts are.  Understand what the story is that is available there.  What is the raw material you have to work with?  Who are the characters that you have?  What are the events?  What are the historical markers that you’ve got to deal with?  What are the documents that you have to deal with?  And then you try to figure out, what are the truths that support your client?  How do you construct a narrative that relies on the truths that are helpful to a narrative that will lead the judge or the jury to find for your client?  And that requires all of the analytical and presentational skills of somebody who’s going to put on a play or a movie, a documentary, because what you’re trying to do is, you’re trying to present a narrative that the jury can understand, absorb and be motivated by. Now the complicating factor is that, unlike a play, you can’t write the script for all of the players.  You can only write the script and write — the script is — even for your own witnesses, it’s not perfect ability.  But you can only determine what witnesses you call for your side.  The other side gets a chance to bring in their witnesses, and they get to ask your witnesses questions. So you’ve got to present your story at least in part by asking questions of people who don’t want to give you answers that will help your narrative.  And you have to use your ability to ask questions of people who do want to help you to be sure you focus what they say in a way that’s going to provide truthful but supportive answers. It’s easy to get truthful answers if you don’t have to worry about them supporting your case, and you can sometimes get supportive answers if you don’t have to worry about the truth.  But to get truthful, supportive answers is what you’ve got to do, and to do that, you’ve got to understand the facts better than anybody else — even better than the parties. When you try a case involving a company, whether it’s your client or somebody else’s client, you’ve got to understand their business, their products, their issues better than they do themselves.