Is there really new technology?

This is something no one has ever been able to do before.

Theranos is doing it.

Unless it's magic, it's a new technology.

That's David Boyz, the legal heavyweight who famously brought Microsoft to heel in the late 1990s

and later represented the disgraced filmmaker Harvey Weinstein.

Elizabeth Holmes had sent him to deal with me on the afternoon of June 23rd, 2015.

By then, I'd been investigating Theranos for five months, and I was on the verge of exposing too closely guarded secrets that would later form the core of the prosecution's indictment.

The company was using conventional machines purchased from third parties for most of its blood tests,

and its testing often had accuracy and reliability problems.

Elizabeth didn't want these truths to come out because they would destroy her carefully crafted image as a Silicon Valley prodigy

and jeopardize Theranos' $10 billion valuation which had made her a billionaire.

So instead of coming herself to answer my questions, she dispatched Boyz, one of the country's most feared litigators, to try to kill my story.

Boyz had arrived at the Wall Street Journal offices in Midtown Manhattan accompanied by three other lawyers.

One of them was Heather King, a former Boyz law firm partner who'd recently joined Theranos as its general counsel.

King played the bad cop to Boyz's good cop.

We would just urge you to look very carefully at your sources. They're not reliable for many reasons.

But as the discussion heated up, Boyz also got ornary.

He said my questions touched on Theranos' trade secrets, which were off limits.

To me, that just sounded like an excuse.

We've got a technology.

Why don't we discuss it more freely?

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