Look At The Crazy Sums Of Money Apple And Samsung Pay Their Experts To Testify In Court

APTim Cook, CEO of Apple

It's not uncommon for large companies to compensate their expert witnesses with giant sums of money - especially in a case as large as Apple and Samsung's ongoing patent trial.

But, as is the case with many occupations, talent costs top dollar.

Under questioning from Samsung attorney John Quinn last week, Apple's damages expert Chris Vellturo revealed that the company is paying him $2.3 million to work on this case alone, The San Jose Mercury News reports.

Samsung is shelling out about $765,000 for one of its top experts, MIT computer scientist Martin Rinard, according to tech blog Electronista.

The Korean tech giant is paying Rinard $850 per hour for 900 hours of work, which essentially means he's making nearly $1million dollars for little over five weeks' of work.

It sounds like a lot of money, but this is what happens in cases like this. A company pays experts to testify, and experts aren't cheap.

To put this in perspective, Rinard makes nearly twice as much as some of the other experts Samsung has hired for the case. The University of Toronto's Dan Wignor is making $450 per hour, while Saul Greenberg of The University of Calgary is being paid $550 per hour to work with Samsung.

Apple is attempting to sue Samsung for more than $2 billion for infringing on five patents, which include a universal search engine, the slide-to-unlock method of unlocking a phone's lock screen, background data syncing, auto-complete texts and presenting addresses, dates, phone numbers and times as links within text messages.

Although Apple is directly targeting Samsung in its accusations, many have argued that the real vendetta is against Google since many of the patents apply to Android features that aren't exclusive to Samsung.