I was going to use $500, which would bring it to 38,000 billable hours. But ... in any law firm, not all the work is done by the lead attorney(s) who bill(s) at $500/hour. I'm not an attorney so I have no idea what percentage would be done by junior attorneys and paralegals, but my guess would be "a bunch." I also don't know what such lower-tier people would be billed at. To keep it simple, I just used $250/hour. Even if we use those arbitrary numbers, it makes it an indeterminate equation -- it could work out to a small number of hours by the big guns and a metric boatload of hours by the minions, or it could be a lot of hours by the big guns and a comparatively few hours by the supporting team.
Let's pick a 2:1 ratio -- that would work out to 19,000 hours by the lead, principal attorney(s), and 38,000 hours by staff averaging $250/hour. So now we're at a total of 57,000 billable hours over the span of one year.
Divide that by 52 weeks and we get 1,096 hours per week. for EVERY week of the year. Nobody, even in the legal profession, works 100 percent billable 100 percent of the time. Another gross assumption -- assume that everyone on the team works 10 hours of overtime a week, so out of 50 hours a week they can bill 40. (Which I think is a real stretch). 1,096 hours divided by 40 means the firm would have had to have 27.4 people working on the NRA matters FULL-TIME.
I don't believe it.