It's Not $100,000 A Month

Just to inject a note of realism here, I want to suggest a correction to a Breitbart story:

Hunter Biden is reportedly weighing the creation of a legal defense fund to cover the charges of his high-powered attorneys, which experts estimate to cost at least $100,000 per month.

. . . The attorneys are a formidable front against congressional staffers and public servants. Hunter’s lawyers are lead attorney Kevin Morris, a high-profile entertainment lawyer, and Abbe Lowell, who represents high-profile individuals engulfed in political scandals, along with Chris Clark and Joshua A. Levy.

These are all partner-level lawyers, with Abbe Lowell and Joshua A Levy in particular having established track records of getting crooked politicians like Bill Clinton and Bob Menendez out of very hot water with dismissals, acquittals, and hung juries. They don't come cheap.

This story says, "Nationally, the average rate billed by partners last year stood at $728 per hour. . . according to data from Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions, a legal analytics company." That would be the US average, not the rate for partners at national white-shoe firms. I've cited links elsewhere that put this at up to $2500 per hour.

In a prior estimate here, I put the rate being charged by the partners at Covington & Burling working for Joe Biden personally at $2000 per hour. I'm using this as a ballpark, and I've been estimating they're billing 40 hours per week, although lawyers typically put much more time in on a case.

But let's assume the four partners working for Hunter are billing just the national average, $728 per hour. Four partners X 40 hours per week X 4 weeks per month x $728 =$465,920 per month, almost five times the estimate in the Breitbart story. But let's assume they're billing $2000 an hour. Four partners X 40 hours per week X 4 weeks per month X $2000 = $1,280,000. If Abbe Lowell and Joshua A Levy are involved, I've got to assume the monthly total is going to be much closer to $1.2 million.

By the way, Hunter brought Abbe Lowell on two months ago, and we have no idea how long this will take. That legal defense fund is going to need scores of millions. We'll definitely want to know who's paying into it.