Conversely, I was in a case where we paid our expert about $75,000 for their expertise, which took about 2 weeks of prep and 2ish days of trial to present.
Opposing counsel tried the same stunt Amazon's lawyers did in your story.
And lost the case. Quite badly.
Speaking to the jury afterwards, we learned the jurors didn't care how much the expert got paid. What mattered was that he did an excellent job of presenting his expert opinion.
And in the scheme of things, his fee was peanuts compared to the damages at issue (and a very small fraction of the legal fees incurred by the lawyers), and trying to make someone look bad for getting fairly paid for their work when there are tens of millions at stake was just a bad take for a lawyer.
As a more personal aside, in this particular case (in which Amazon, the defendant, did win the case), the judge noted that they found my testimony compelling and that it likely made a large impact on the jury's deliberations. I was not paid for my time appearing in court, though I was paid for prep time (code review, mostly). Money well spent, I would guess. More important for me was at least one small instance of vanquishing one of the worst patent trolls on the planet (even if the defendant is not exactly a model client).
Opposing counsel tried the same stunt Amazon's lawyers did in your story.
And lost the case. Quite badly.
Speaking to the jury afterwards, we learned the jurors didn't care how much the expert got paid. What mattered was that he did an excellent job of presenting his expert opinion.
And in the scheme of things, his fee was peanuts compared to the damages at issue (and a very small fraction of the legal fees incurred by the lawyers), and trying to make someone look bad for getting fairly paid for their work when there are tens of millions at stake was just a bad take for a lawyer.