These days, drugmakers need a good litigator. But a firm with the right talent will cost you.

Here’s why: The rate law firms have to pay to hire an experienced and knowledgeable patent litigator with a decent client list can ran up to $1.8 million, with top rainmakers commanding $5 million and up. And then there’s the signing bonus, too. No wonder those billable hours keep going up.

“If I could hire five or six lawyers today, I would in a second,” Claude Stern, co-chair of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges’s IP group, tells The American Lawyer. “We’re really scraping.”

Not surprisingly, more law firms are trying to get into patent ligitation. A key reason: those patent wars between big pharma and generics are extremely lucrative. Just imagine the bill that Cravath Swaine & Moore partners Evan Chesler, Richard Stark and David Greenwald will hand Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis later this year for the Plavix litigation against Apotex.

Why, you could probably take that money and fund discovery for a whole new drug.

[tags]Lawyers, Patents[/tags]