David Boies may be the most talented lawyer of his generation; he’s certainly the most famous. His defeated adversaries include Bill Gates, General William Westmoreland, and Major League Baseball. His silver tongue and catlike balance in the courtroom (and at press podiums) kept Vice President Gore’s presidential hopes alive for a month during the Florida recount.

Mr. Boies’s autobiography, “Courting Justice: From New York Yankees v. Major League Baseball to Bush v. Gore, 1997-2000” (Miramax, 416 pages, $25.95), which appeared this fall, was quite good for its genre, briskly written and lacking the self-aggrandizement common to other autobiographies. This may be due to the skill of his editor, Richard Cohen (the author of a very well-regarded book on fencing). But it clearly has a lot to do with Mr. Boies: He comes across in the book, as on camera, as a very likable, diligent man. One of his greatest skills with the media is that he knows how to talk like a human being, not like a lawyer. Now we know he can write like one, too.

The book moves smoothly through Mr. Boies’s greatest cases, describing the arguments made and the negotiating tactics he used, moving through his career at Cravath and then with the firm he founded. Interspersed throughout are wonderful vignettes about the way the law works and how Mr. Boies organizes his famous cross-examinations.

One intriguing section describes his interrogation on behalf of CBS of General Westmoreland, who had brought a libel case against “60 Minutes.” Mr. Boies deliberately picked up the pace of his questioning each day, adding irritation into his voice bit by bit and slowly introducing evidence that sank the general’s credibility. Mr. Boies’s goal was gradually to tear the general’s reputation apart, without ever appearing disrespectful to an icon. He succeeded, and aspiring lawyers should read that chapter attentively.

Karen Donovan’s book about Mr. Boies, “v. Goliath” (Pantheon, 384 pages, $24.95) is just as good but presents a more complex portrait. The former National Law Journal reporter was given extraordinary access to Mr. Boies (she seems to spend half the book sitting next to him on planes and trains), and it paid off.

“Courting Justice” focuses exclusively on cases that Mr. Boies won (with the exception of Bush v. Gore). Ms. Donovan’s book also dissects the cases that Boies lost, like his defense of the music-sharing company Napster and his failed suit against the HMO industry. Ms. Donovan blitzes some of the work that Mr. Boies lauds as well.

In “Courting Justice,” Mr. Boies describes his longtime client Amy Habie as a saintly woman with a desperate desire to win back custody rights for her children from their Guatemalan-tycoon father. To Ms. Donovan, Ms. Habie’s case was a foolish and financially inappropriate “morass” that Mr. Boies wasted his (and Cravath’s) time on. Ms. Donovan cites speculation that there might have been a romantic relationship between Mr. Boies and Ms. Habie as well.

My guess is that Mr. Boies granted Ms. Donovan incredible access, assuming she’d write something fawning, as most journalists who get close to him do. When Mr. Boies realized she wasn’t going to write a 400-page puff piece, he rushed to get his book out first.

Despite these differences, the books resemble each other in many ways. They follow similar arcs, with in-depth reporting about trials and specific strategies, and very little analysis or insight into why exactly David Boies really matters. He’s famous now, and he’ll be famous next year. But will anybody care about him in two decades?

Even after reading both books, I don’t know. People will remember Mr. Boies as a symbol of his era because of the cases he’s argued, and he’ll always be given credit (or blame) for leading prestigious law firms into the muck of the plaintiff’s bar. His 1998 suit against vitamin manufacturers was one of the first times that a white-shoe firm had joined with traditional “ambulance chasers.”

But Mr. Boies offers little insight into his larger role or psyche. He claims to have entered the law because he liked Perry Mason (something every lawyer says about himself) and mundanely states that he chooses clients who are competitive and smart. Mr. Boies also says that he chooses cases because he thinks they are on the right side of justice.

That’s only partly believable. It’s hard to trust the ideals of a man who has represented both Napster and the computer company SCO. The latter company has been trying to use technicalities in copyright law to destroy the open-source operating system Linux. Napster’s goal – of using the Internet’s capacity to enable sharing and collaboration at the expense of established industries – was close to the opposite.

Mr. Boies isn’t a money-grubber, but it seems he is an adrenaline-grubber, choosing cases mainly on what will give him the biggest buzz. He’s more Edward Bennett Williams than Clarence Darrow. That makes him less interesting – though not necessarily less important – than if he followed a more developed moral compass.

Ms. Donovan has the advantage of writing about Mr. Boies from the outside. But the character traits that lead to his success in her view seem banal: He has a photographic memory, he works hard, he loves the limelight, and he’s lucky. In “v. Goliath,” Mr. Boies is Michael Jordan. He does all the things that everyone else tries to do. He just does them better and he wins the games he plays. But law is more complicated than basketball, and it would be nice if our greatest legal icon was something more than the best athlete on (or at) the court.

Mr. Thompson last wrote for these pages on future sources of energy.