That's kind of like saying that all of Apple's engineers are on salary, so even it it takes a team of 100 engineers 6 months to write the software the DoJ asked for, there's really no cost to Apple.

Businesses don't often pay employees to do nothing, that legal team would be doing other corporate legal work if they weren't working on this case, and I'm sure they paid outside consultants to help with the case.

That is a fair point. I will reiterate that I agreed with the original poster and was positing what the counterargument presented from the courts/3 letter agencies would be.

We'll never see that counterargument regarding the cost of engineering FBiOS, since the case was withdrawn.

[Edit: we'll never see it because I believe that the FBI will not likely go after Apple again, specifically because they put up a much more forceful fight against it than the FBI ever thought they would. Admittedly I'm speculating, but I don't think I'm being unreasonable]

No company on earth uses corporate counsel for this sort of thing. Apple hired two outside firms.

I know nothing about corporate law, thanks for the info.

I don't think this is a question particularly about Apple, but more so around the system. If it were another entity without the same financial backing how would they be able to handle it?