There aren't even 900 hours in a month. That's 765k for 900 billed hours, and you have to imagine that a good chunk of unbilled hours also occurred. So maybe that's for the equivalent of 8 months of boring work. Not continuous 8 months either, you have to schedule other things between prepping. A lot of money. But not for a billion dollar lawsuit.

As for "who can afford this" is a company worth tens of billions suing over a major product line vs a trillion dollar company.

> and you have to imagine that a good chunk of unbilled hours also occurred

No, I don’t have to imagine that expert witnesses do an hourly-billed contract gig but are bad billing hours.

Once they get the contract. I guarantee that the recruitment process and negotiation process was more involved than a phone call. And there could be work specifically excluded as "billable hours" that is still work. For instance, is the time to fly out compensated?

> I guarantee that the recruitment process and negotiation process was more involved than a phone call.

I suppose, but do you think that was more than 9 hours? Because 9 hours is only 1% of their time.

It could easily be more than 9 hours. How many people spend longer than that interviewing for a technical position across five rounds? And this is for one of the few experts Samsung will put up to defend a $xxx million suit.

Plus, he works for MIT. He probably needs to clear his consulting work, which could be quick or not. MIT might have wanted a percentage. And if he wanted to use a grad student to assist him in prep work, negotiating that can add up too.

There are other ways to add to the precontract numbers, but that should be enough.

Nine hours per round times five rounds plus another nine hours to get clearance is still only 6%

And that's a huge number of hours for each round.

It's really hard to reach "a good chunk" when compared to 900 hours. I was considering saying 90 hours in my first post.

If MIT wants a cut that's a different issue, and I doubt negotiating that will take particularly long.

All work that an expert does for a case is billable, including travel time. However, experts will frequently provide discounted or even unbilled work for individuals in certain circumstances (like criminal cases where the expert is testing in a forensic capacity to counter improper forensic analysis presented by a prosecution expert).

Some experts charge for their time at a reduced rate (e.g. 50%) for travel, some a predetermined amount (taking the risk of delays on themselves), some only for the cost of the tickets, hotels, meals, etc.

There is, AFAIK and based on what I can Google, no universal answer.

> One month of work for $765k.

900 hours is a bit more than one month. Even if he only worked 24x7 that's over 5 weeks. Assuming 10 hour days and 5 days a week that's 18 weeks, just shy of 13 weeks if 10 hours a day and 7 days a week.

I’d love to hire people that can work 900 hours in a single month. Just tell me where to find them. Or, wait, maybe they work in higher dimensions. Drat.

AI

Where are you getting this "single month" stuff?

The person they're replying to who said "one month".

One is singular.

I didn't say that, though.

They weren't replying to you, they were replying to neurocline.

then they should have replied directly to neurocline, who didn't say anything about 900 hours.

Sorry, that was neurocline responding directly to vasco. Either way, they weren't responding directly to you.

vasco was the one responding to you.

What you can work and what you can bill are two different things. I know of a few people that charge their rate from the minute they leave on a trip which is basically the min they put down their phone to the minute they get back. However, they are all doing emergency, the company is losing tens of thousands per hour on the low end until this is fixed, kind of things.

Apple and/or Samsung

Specialized attorneys with subject matter expertise are billing them $1500/hr, so $850 is kind of a bargain.

He was an MIT professor of CS.

Who said "one month"?