In a deposition taken in July, Bartov disclosed that he was being paid $1,350 an hour to work on the case. In court, he said he had now worked about 650 hours on the case, which would total $877,500.
Questioned by lawyers for New York’s attorney general, Bartov said the money had come from the Trump Organization and the former president’s political action committee, Save America.
That’s $1.8M a year. If you worked for an average large US company, you’d have to be a senior executive to get that. Yes, it’s short term, but your executive comp would probably be at least half tied up in benefits you don’t have ready access to: stock options with multi-year vesting, bonuses tied to company performance, etc. Cash salary is more valuable, almost always, regardless of how HR tries to spin it.
That’s not just a lot of money, it’s a shit-ton of money.