What's my time worth?

I can name six different companies that would have been shut down if it weren't for my law firm.

Now, that's not just me bragging or exaggerating or taking more credit than we deserve. In each of the six cases, the company had been founded by someone who had gone into competition with his or her previous employer. In each case, the old company had sued to enforce a noncompete agreement and had asked a court to shut down our client. In each case, we successfully defended the new company, allowing them to stay in business.

Now compare that to other work I've done as an employment lawyer. For example, I'm often asked to write or revise a company's personnel handbook. These handbooks often include provisions that I consider ridiculous. What most drives me crazy are bereavement-leave policies, where employers make hyperlegalistic rules about whose funeral an employee can go to without having their pay docked. (For more on these policies, including an incredible real-world example, see "The world's shortest employee handbook" at our workplace blog, Gruntled Employees.) Needless to say, I'm not a fan of helping an employer decide whether an uncle or a niece is a close-enough relative to justify an employee being allowed time off for the funeral.

As many of our readers know, my firm, Shepherd Law Group, hasn't billed a single hour since 2006. But we used to, and for some of the work I described above, we did.

Hourly billing values equally all the time I spend working for clients, regardless of the project I'm working on, and regardless of the value the client receives.

Is there anyone out there who believes that the work I did to save those six companies from court-ordered extinction was equal in value — on a minute-for-minute, or rather six-minutes-for-six-minutes, basis — to the time I spent tweaking stupid bereavement policies?

If you can honestly say that you think the work was equally valuable, then you are a true defender of the billable hour, and we'd love to hear from you. But I won't hold my breath.