Doesn’t matter if it’s engineering, law, or cotton picking. The only requisite is that you must have first-hand knowledge that an unrelated entity (to the contractor) has paid this astronomical rate.
1982, I think. $1,500/hr.<p>There was this massive seed drill machine called a "Maxi Cultivator" that was more complicated than a combined harvester and made in Italy, had to be pulled by a SAME (aka Lamborghini) tractor with a ground speed PTO, all sorts of "prototype" madness for a million dollar machine.<p>I worked for a company that was the USA side of the partnership to demonstrate and hopefully sell these machines to farmers doing the new "no-till" style planting. We had this thing ready to go, the day before some big farm day show, and the test runs broke something <i>deep</i>.<p>So this Italian master mechanic dude gets flown to the wilds of West TN overnight to fix this machine <i>right now</i>. Spoke no English, but he and our mechanics were able to communicate quite effectively. Sign language and profanity are universal.<p>He got it fixed in 4hr and the show went on; he hung around for the rest of event just in case, I think on the manufacturer's dime. I recall the bitching about the rate he got billed at later.
7,500 EUR an hour. This was for one of the best tax consultants in the jurisdiction to set up a fully "tax optimized" holding structure for an extremely wealthy person, think he ended up billing like 15-20 hours just for his work, and don't know how much went to trust companies etc.
We once ended up billing what was effectively £4900 for 2 x 25 minute sessions to show a bunch of hedge fund managers how to send a tweet. That equates to £5880 an hour. If I include travel each way it was only £2261 an hour.
Not really his fault, but Jayson Williams getting a $94 million contract and only playing 30 games before a career-ending injury is awfully expensive amortizing that over the hours he contributed in two months of play. I guess that technically isn't hourly billing.<p>There's Bill Clinton getting $750,000 for a single speaking engagement which was roughly an hour.<p>If that isn't the real answer, it's going to be something stupid nobody knows about like some rich asshole paying Jay-Z $5 million to give a private performance at his daughter's sweet 16 party.
I know a person who bills $3,500 for a basic 30 min general anaesthetic ($7k an hour). That cost does not include the surgeons fee, or the cost of the consumables, or the cost of the operating room. The operating room itself is about $150 a minute. Consumables are astronomical (anything medical is just expensive) and surgeon’s fee’s depend on the surgeon and also the specialty. Ranging from like $5k to about $60k (the most I’ve ever known to be charged) for a single procedure.
I think David Boies (lawyer) hourly rate was $1900 a couple years ago, from what I understand. Most biglaw partners in NYC bill at $1k-$1.5k per hour, I think.
The other side of this is billing anything for something that doesn’t do what you want.<p>Usually migrate some council, gov department, hospital to some payroll / erp / crm for multiple years for multiple millions to something that doesn’t work.<p>Or a lighting cable that doesn’t charge the phone, that’s almost free money