Funnily enough, I am rather intimately familiar with legal billing. Many, many years ago, I worked for a company that did semi-automated audits of legal invoic

Funnily enough, I am rather intimately familiar with legal billing. Many, many years ago, I worked for a company that did semi-automated audits of legal invoices for global-scale clients. The number of times we caught lawyers billing full-partner rates for paralegal work was not small. We made a very good business by pointing out that $1000+ per hour was a tad expensive for photocopying documents. For a large legal firm, you can get away with this. As an independent consultant, your reputation, and the future success of your business, is based on the value you deliver to your client. If you had to spend 20+ hours tracking down a tough bug because the bug itself was that ugly, you bill for that time. But, on the other hand, if you blew 20+ hours tracking down a typo in the code that you made, you write that time off and credit it to the client. This is, in part, how you show your clients that you are worth $X000 per day: because they are only paying for the time that you spend generating value for them.