Deflategate legal costs potentially could reach a staggering $20 million
Deflategate hasn't been cheap for the NFL.
By
John Breech
•
1 min read
The seemingly never-ending story of Deflategate will continue on Thursday when the NFL heads to court in New York where it will appeal Judge Richard Berman's decision to overturn Tom Brady's four-game suspension.
By the time the court session starts on March 3, almost 10 months will have passed since Ted Wells released his original report on Deflategate. If Berman's decision is upheld, then we can probably label Brady the second-biggest winner of Deflategate.
The biggest winner? Lawyers. All the lawyers.
The NFL's legal team is going rake in some serious money for the work it has done on Deflategate. It's not just the league's legal team though. Lawyers for the NFLPA and the Patriots will also have pulled in some serious money when all is said and done in this case.
According to an estimate from ESPN.com, the three entities in this case (NFL, NFLPA and the Patriots) will have spent almost $20 million on legal fees by the time Deflategate is finally settled.
Most of that money will be spent by the NFL, which will drop an estimated $12.5 million. We know for a fact that the league spent $2.5 million on the Deflategate report because that's how much Wells said he billed the NFL for the three-month investigation.
The NFLPA is expected to have nine lawyers in court on Thursday and if you've ever hired a lawyer, you know that's not going to be cheap. The estimated cost for the NFLPA over the past 10 months is about $5.5 million.
The Patriots also spent some serious money when they brought in an outside counsel to attack the Wells report. The 20,000-word rebuttal took a lot of time to put together and the estimate is that it'll probably cost the Patriots roughly $500,000.
The Patriots were also fined $1 million for Deflategate, so that's another huge chunk of change out of the team's pocket.
The moral of the story here is that if you're going to become a lawyer, make sure you know a lot about deflated footballs.
