AUSTIN — Far be it from us to dump on lawyers, even greedy ones, but a mailing this week from a coalition of business and legal reform groups has put the attorneys’ share of the Texas tobacco settlement into new perspective. It is so mind-boggling we had to share it with our readers before we burst.

At issue is whether Texas owes a group of five private attorneys $2.3 billion in legal fees for work they did to coerce a $17.6 billion settlement out of a group of tobacco companies. The lawyers (surprise!) and Texas Attorney General Dan Morales say it does. Gov. George W. Bush and a bipartisan group of legislators says whoa.

The issue is almost certain to end up in one or more courts before it is settled, but Texans for Reasonable Legal Fees has put a pencil to the dollar figure in an effort to bring the number down to earth in a form understandable to mere mortals like us. And boy, did they succeed.

According to their simple calculations, if the five lawyers in question worked eight hours a day, seven days a week for 18 months, they each would have amassed 4592 billable hours of work. To justify a payment of $2.3 billion, each lawyer would have to bill the state $105,022 per hour!

Even if they paid 100 additional lawyers $300 per hour each, the reform group adds, their remaining take would still be $99,022 per hour.

And if those numbers are still too difficult to grasp, the group points out that the $2.3 billion these five lawyers are demanding would pay the average annual salaries of 75,000 Texas teachers.