The eagerly awaited deposition of former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow in the massive Enron securities class action that is still going pending against numerous large investment banks (many other defendants have settled)  may occur soon.  According to this article in the NY Times, plaintiffs' counsel in the case has asked the Court to schedule the deposition soon, before Fastow is assigned to a prison.  Fastow is currently in solitary confinement in a Houston detention center, awaiting assignment.

The article notes that the deposition of the now-cooperating Fastow will be critical to the case, and "will take an estimated 10 days, plus more than two weeks of preparation, said one lawyer involved in the case. Some 80 lawyers will probably to want to attend."

Whoa--80 lawyers?  By my quick math, 80 lawyers billing 10 hours per day for 10 days, at a rate of $400/hour* adds up to a $3,200,000 deposition.  And that just for the event itself, not including any of the preparation that these 80 lawyers will need to do.

Hopefully this deposition will prove more fruitful than the discovery to date in the case.  The article notes that so far in the case, millions of pages of documents and hundreds of other depositions have amounted to very little information for the plaintiffs:

Despite truckloads of documents from Enron and the banks, and millions of dollars spent on the case so far, civil lawyers had struggled to learn much of anything from the banks’ own employees. Plaintiffs’ lawyers took 175 depositions from bank officials over the last 18 months, most of them running 15 hours long. Yet nearly all of those officials either exercised their Fifth Amendment right to not testify or said they did not recall anything relevant, according to two lawyers involved in the case.

* I'm three years removed from private practice so I'm guessing on the $400/hour average billing rate of the presumably high-level lawyers who will be present.  I guess I'm excluding people like 4-digit man Ben Civiletti.  Anyone care to refine my estimate?