There are a lot of comments on my answer about expert witnesses, so I'll collect it all here: Martin Rinard is a star. They pay him $850/hour because he testif

There are a lot of comments on my answer about expert witnesses, so I'll collect it all here: Martin Rinard is a star. They pay him $850/hour because he testifies well, and he's done it before. He's got the credentials from MIT so juries tend to listen to him. I remember this exchange: Apple lawyer: So that was a lot of money! Martin: It was a lot of work. People seem to be doing some object inheritance from an ancestor post's "one month" but I didn't say that. His work would have gone over many months. They interview him, and he writes something. Then the lawyers rewrite it. Then they all go over it, line by line. It's excruciatingly boring. I sat in on two days of the review of a different expert witness' 300-page declaration, and they had another day planned after me! They probably have a mock trial, where he practices his testimony (I'm not sure how prevalent that is). I didn't work on Apple v. Samsung; I was just a spectator. I don't know what an expert witness would get in this Stanford thing, but it doesn't seem to me like the spending would quite so wild.