anons, I'm trying to understand the 40mil in pro-bono legal services commitment made by paul, Weiss to Trump.

40mil is, at $200 per billable hour, 200,000 hours. you might expect 2000 billable hours of work per year at a biglaw firm, and so this is effectively a team of 100 lawyers for one year

(or 50 for two or 25 for his full term)

that's quite a bit. 25 free lawyers day in and day out covers a lot of ground.

was there some sort of gotcha? were these firms providing pro-bono services to the DNC or in some grey-area way which meant they had to make in-kind offerings?

simply losing security clearance i guess threatens their ability to do government work and maybe those contracts are significant enough that 40mil is "worth it".

but it sure seems like a strongarm tactic from the outside - and i would expect there's more to this deal at stake than just "you get to keep doing sneaky work".

help me make it make sense please