For background, I participated in a "small" action that Sun took against someone who was violating the Java license. The legal fees (in the late 90's) were 8.2 million dollars. $250K is nothing to sneeze at, its a solid 6 weeks of a single lawyer's time, maybe a couple of weeks for a small team. Against a company doing nearly a billion dollars a year in revenue[1] and owning 29% of the printer market? Add in a couple of expert witnesses which are essential to that sort of a case and you'll see that $250K isn't even table stakes. Sad, I know, but it is the way things are these days.
And the saddest thing is that Bambu knows this. They know that people who give away software are not a serious threat to them. And it is especially galling that the value they have extracted out of that software will pay the lawyers that keep you from preventing them from continuing to extract that value and keep it for themselves.
[1] "Media reports have also indicated that Bambu Lab has shipped more than 1.2 million units, claiming a 29% global share." -- https://kr-asia.com/bambu-lab-nears-usd-100-billion-valuatio...
Lawyers earn 250k per 6 weeks? More than 2M per year?
Have a look at this: https://ukcalculator.com/barrister-fees-calculator.html
It is for the UK but no doubt m'learned friends in the US can command even higher fees.
Try grabbing a KC for five days, civil/commercial with all the trimmings. That will set you back £105,000.
Obviously the impoverished KC won't pocket all that lolly. There is VAT to pay and staff costs and stuff.
A KC is one of these: https://kcappointments.org/ for obvious reasons they used to known as QCs
Yes. Well they certainly bill at that rate, it goes some to the lawyer, some to rent, etc.
Outrageous cartel then. For such amounts there would be plenty who would have intellectual chops to do the job, driving the price down. Legal costs are nowhere close to this outside the US.
IP litigation is absolutely that expensive, outside the US and inside. Didn’t you just come into this conversation unaware of what IP litigators earn?
Can you imagine how litigious we'd be if legal services were cheaper?
This just means that there's pent up demand for litigation that is currently left unfulfilled because it's too expensive. Or, equivalently, many people think that they have been wronged and must simply take it, due to litigation being the only option to enforce that issue while litigation is too expensive to be affordable to them, or more expensive than the cost of the dispute (so, in effect, scamming people out of small dollar amounts is legal since the cost of enforcing one's legal rights may be in excess of the cost of the dispute).
Imagine what would happen if we made it cheaper, as happens very frequently when some other good or service becomes cheaper? Usually the provision/manufacture has some advancements that make it much more scalable, and often less involved, resulting in a lower cost, and sometimes but not always lower quality. So, for litigation? We'd get lower cost, via some more efficient¹ system², maybe lower quality depending on how we make that system more efficient and this may or may not matter in any particular case, and then those people who think that they've been wronged suddenly have an avenue to address it. Overall, this seems like a strong positive to me.
Now, what if people start enforcing frivolous legal rights? Repeal or reform the law that creates the right if it' s so bad. What about people dragging others into court in bad faith? Well, we just streamlined the bureaucracy and took a buzz-saw to the costs, so is it hard to defend against? Perhaps not. Making that perhaps a certain reality would be a good goal of such reform methods. We already allow people with more money and systemic literacy to bully people in this way, and this is a large part of litigiousness in our society now, so this strategy becoming ineffective may reduce it substantially and thus ironically make litigiousness less intense in at least some cases.
1: one proposal off the top of my head (so it may be terrible): sending written documents to a judge with LLMs helping lay people write and refine them, or a cheaper-than-a-litigation-lawyer expert human review service, perhaps, then the judge rules on their own schedule asynchronously for civil disputes without any heavy procedure to deal with.
2: another proposal is to remove law school/JD requirements to obtain a law license, but keeping a rigorous test in place and maybe some less-intense character/background checks, to lower the pay of lawyers
Lawyers fees for a case like that also include expenses, and this would be on the high side.
Court fees, fees for accessing case law, experts, paralegals, etc.
You pay the lawyer and a big portion of that goes towards his costs for additional labour and everything else. A lawyer grossing $2m/year isn't bringing home anything close to that.
That said $250k for a single lawyer for 6 weeks seems high.
I've only had to hire a lawyer once, and it was $2,500 to have them file a couple papers and speak to the judge once.
You're paying for their experience, just like an engineer - only it's often much higher stakes than a piece of software or product: your livelihood or freedom.
Yes. About 5-10% at a big firm earn that.