It’s near impossible to estimate the actual number of hours either team would have spent. While the number and page count of filings might provide some insight into a minimum number of billable hours, we can’t know how many hours have been spent in client meetings, what kind of time has been spent going through discovery documents, and the myriad other things involved in a legal battle.
An IP attorney is going to run at least in the $200-300 an hour range and could be as high as $500 for a really highly experienced and regarded attorney. Consider that at $300 an hour, a single 40 hour work week bills out at $12k. It adds up very quickly.
I think I read something about one of the earlier depositions taking seven hours. And that’s just the time the attorney spent in the deposition itself. Preparing for a deposition, and the work afterwards of parsing and examining all the answers, can be a multiple of the time in the deposition itself. Just look at how much paper the suit has already generated in this still somewhat early stage. Each one of the significant filings on the courtlistener page likely cost at least in the thousands of dollars.
Yeah, they are likely at or near that $500 figure an hour for the lawyer’s time. P&F’s attorneys are also SF based which is a high priced market. I am being intentionally a bit conservative with the 200-300 ballpark.
Randomly googling things gives an article from 2015 about big firms in Boston and their average partner rates. It puts NP at $520 (which is actually the lowest of the firms the article compares).
Though that is for partners. I don’t know what level the various attorneys involved on the NP side are. This seems like the type of case where a partner would be maybe supervisory rather than the principal. Still, I agree, I am likely way over-correcting in my attempt not to blow things out of proportion.
When it comes to estimates, the only thing I think it’s safe to say is that the out of pocket costs for the defense have certainly exceeded the ~$43k the defense fund raised.
Yeah, I’m just going from my experience as a partner in a large law firm. ;)
I do agree with you that we have no real way of knowing how they’re staffing it, or anything like that. Just pointing out that $200 an hour is the rate of a junior associate at these types of firms (just because, as mentioned, I have some insight there given my own background).
Given your background, out of curiosity what would you ballpark the number of billable hours that goes into a document like the original counter-complaint?
I’ve spent half my career creating software for lawyers so I have a passing familiarity with the law and how law practices (though mainly small ones) operate. My wife is a lawyer, but a corporate one not a litigator. I can ask her how many hours it might take to redline a complicated lease, but not so much a pleading in an IP case. I know things can vary greatly from one practice area to another so it might be hard, for example, for a PI lawyer to estimate an IP case. Still, what kind of time would you figure just putting together one of those docs might be?
As to the original question, quantification is near impossible. Descriptively it’s probably somewhere between “yeah, that’s going to impact my retirement” and “enough to make a grown man cry”.
Reiche & Ford strenuously object to Stardock’s abusive attempts to depose Mark Palmer, litigation counsel for Reiche & Ford. Stardock has not offered any justification for deposing an attorney of record in this case.
I would think that if the attorney had dealt with the other contracts/deals in question it might be reasonable, but I would think the questioning would be very narrow.
Seems possible it could have to do with the PR company P&F hired. Previous filings mentioned meetings where both the lawyers and PR folks were involved, and Stardock had been trying to find out what was discussed in those meetings. I always assumed that their goal with that was to prove that P&F had an explicit strategy of trying to defame Brad personally.
