IP Expert Witnesses Paid $2K/Hour

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The WSJ reported recently that a few New York lawyers have raised their hourly billing rates above $1,000. IP expert witnesses in multimillion dollar cases can also command impressive hourly rates. Expert witnesses in costly patent cases can earn up to $2,000 an hour. “If you have an expert in a field, and the expertise is hard to come by, it would stand to reason you can charge a great deal,” said Claude Stern, the chairman of the intellectual property group at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges. Law.com also writes:

‘In the big picture, paying $30,000 to back up your case isn’t a bad deal,’ Weil, Gotshal & Manges partner Edward Reines said. ‘Clearly, there are people who lend enough value to a case that they can charge that’…Wei-Ning Yang, a Hogan & Hartson partner in L.A., said last week that the firm is currently paying an MIT professor $2,000 an hour in an IP dispute…Hogan & Hartson wouldn’t disclose the name of the expert since the trial is ongoing.