It's in the linked article:

"I’ve spent about 200 hours on the matter and Sabrina about another 80. My comparable market hourly rate (partner at a top NYC patent firm) would be $750 and a comparable rate for Sabrina (senior associate at a top patent firm) would be about $500."

Okay, so that is equivalent to 1 person working 40 hour weeks for 7 weeks. So, one person pulling $6K a day. ($1.5M/yr) I think you could find legal support for less than that.

Assuming they could maintain that for a full year, $6K a day is only 2.2MM. Also keep in mind that these hotshots don't do much of the grunt work, they offload it to any number of junior associates (which that hourly rate has to cover, in addition to other business overhead). Still not a bad gig if you can get it.

Keep in mind that a partner at a top firm who bills her time out at $750, is making a lot more than that, due to the nature of a legal partnership.

Any associate work will be billed straight through. Nobody works for free.

Even if the rate was 10% of their quote, it's still $20k. Which is no laughing matter.

Based on this survey of attorney fees between 2010 and 2011, it could be anywhere between 510 hours (roughly, in California), to 900 hours (roughly, in the "West"), depending on years of practice and specialty.

http://www.nclc.org/images/pdf/litigation/fee-survey-report-...

edit: that's strictly hourly rates. Some (most?) attorneys will charge you for gas/transportation to and from the courthouse and their office, paper/toner costs from xerox machines, etc, which can add up fairly quickly, especially on a large case like one against Lodsys.

also, IANAL.

s/some/all/ Plus associates, of course.

A case like this would be about 4 months (570 hours) or so of billable work by a good lawyer @ $350/hr or so.

Good lawyers cost quite a bit more than $350 an hour. Many of the "top" law firms charge north of $1000 an hour these days, below that $500-600/hour for a good quality lawyer is about what I'd expect. Fairly insane but it's one of those things where if losing is more painful than that price, you have no choice.