New court filings in Apple Inc.’s patent suit against Samsung Electronics offer a peek at how much the combatants pay just some of their outside counsel. Needless to say, their lawyers aren’t cheap.
Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan partners charged an average of $821 per hour and associates billed about $448 per hour on a discovery dispute, the firm said in a weekend filing.
Those numbers don’t even include the rate for Quinn Emanuel star litigator Charles Verhoeven, who is leading the Samsung’s defense. They’re the averages for four partners, one of counsel and eight associates who worked on three motions related to an ongoing discovery dispute in the case, in which Apple claims Samsung “slavishly” copied elements of the iPad and iPhone.
The discovery dispute began in October when Samsung filed a motion to force Apple’s lawyers at Morrison & Foerster to hand over employee deposition transcripts related to the case.
The court sided with Samsung. But Apple dragged its feet, according to the Quinn Emanuel lawyers, who filed and won a motion to enforce the court order.
Apple then produced more than 34,000 pages of deposition testimony, but still “withheld numerous inventor transcripts and more than 240 other relevant transcripts,” Quinn Emanuel partner Diane Hutnyan wrote in a declaration filed Sunday.
So Samsung filed a third motion, this time for sanctions against Apple, which U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal granted on July 11.
“There is really no question that Apple violated the Dec. 22 order,” Grewal wrote.
Apple has until July 29, just two days before a jury is to be seated, to pay.
The total bill going to Apple for litigating that little discovery spat? Just under $260,000 for 262 hours.
That’s comparable to what Apple’s outside counsel at MoFo have been paid, Hutnyan argued in her papers. She pointed to a May filing from MoFo that said the average combined rate for both partners and associates working on a different discovery dispute was $526 per hour.
MoFo did not provide an average hourly billing rate for partners and associates separately, but said its median partner rate is $582 an hour, and its median associate rate is $398.
Trial is set to begin on July 31 before U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose.
This story was originally published by The Recorder, an American Lawyer affiliate.
