New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera's column last weekend excoriated H.P. and SAP, and presented Oracle in a positive light. One problem: Nocera's fiancee is the PR person for Oracle's lead attorney in its lawsuit against SAP. Woops.

• David Boies—the famed trial lawyer who represented Al Gore in the contested presidential election of 2000, and counts Michael Moore, George Steinbrenner, Calvin Klein, and Harvey Weinstein as a few of his high-profile clients—has picked up a new apartment on Fifth Avenue. Boies and his third wife Mary paid $7.75 million for a 35th-floor apartment at the Sherry-Netherland. The couple snagged a healthy discount, too. The seven-room spread first went on the market for $9.95 million in April. [Cityfile, WBM]

In November of 2000, if you'd have bet your life against the fact that the man representing Bush in the case of Bush v. Gore would one day lead the fight to legalize gay marriage, you'd be dead now.

As we've noted before, Elizabeth Wurtzel, the Prozac Nation author who graduated from Yale Law School last year, hasn't passed the bar exam yet. But that hasn't stop her from pretending to be a lawyer! Which might be illegal.

Rupert Murdoch turns 78 today. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is turning 73. Joel and Benji Madden are 30. Sam Donaldson is turning 75. Famed attorney David Boies is 68. Finance exec Alexandra Lebenthal is 45. Real estate broker Robby Browne is 61. Jesse Jackson, Jr. is turning 44. Singer Lisa Loeb is turning 41. Terrence Howard is 40. Actress Thora Birch is turning 27. Bobby McFerrin is turning 59. Director Jerry Zucker is 59. Rapper Paul Wall is 28. Johnny Knoxville is 38. And Long Island's very own Joey Buttafuoco is celebrating his 53rd birthday today.

Thousands of attorneys have lost their jobs as the economy has spiraled downward in recent months. One group who won't be unemployed in the near future (and probably won't be seeing their husbands and wives much either): The ones who have been retained to defend Bernie Madoff and the men who showered him with cash, people like Walter Noel, Ezra Merkin, and Bob Jaffe. This week, Noel's hedge fund, Fairfield Greenwich, was sued for a third time in as many weeks. The plaintiffs in the most recent suit include several anonymous offshore trusts and a Mexican businessman by the name of Carlos Gauch. But they've lined up a star attorney, David Boies of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, to make Noel's life miserable. Just in case you don't have anything better to do this evening, you can look over the most recent legal assault on Noel after the jump.

Remember Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of Prozac Nation who went back to law school, landed a job at David Boies' powerhouse firm, Boies, Schiller & Flexner, and soon found herself smack-dab in the middle of the messy sale of Wachovia to Wells Fargo? Well, it turns out Wurtzel didn't pass the bar exam last summer. (That might explain why she describes herself as a "part-time" employee at Boies' firm, and why it doesn't include her in its staff directory.) But Wurtzel appears pretty non-plussed about the fuss: "I guess when I should have been studying, I was kind of having a good time." [NYO]

One of the most prominent trial attorneys in America, Boies is best known for unsuccessfully representing Al Gore during the legal wrangling after the 2000 presidential election and for teaming up with Bush v. Gore adversary Theodore Olsen for challenging the constitutionality of Prop 8.