Attorney Mikal Watts charges $950 an hour for his time. Cha-ching! Cha-ching! Cha-ching! If you’re a client of his, you want to cut to the chase, and fast.
You don’t want to chit chat with this guy. None of this: “Hey, Mikal, how’ve you been? How’s your family? What you got planned for the weekend? How about those Texans? Say, listen, the reason I’m calling is –”
Still, if Mikal Watts can charge $950 an hour for his time, he must be a super genius, right? Can you even imagine how brilliant he is? No, of course you can’t, because you don’t have a $950-an-hour brain.
But high-priced brains aren’t always used for high-priced thoughts. Sometimes they’re deployed on mundane matters. Even then, though, they’re charging high-priced rates.
For instance, what would you charge to read a newspaper article? Nothing, right? Maybe if the article was on a subject that didn’t interest you and you were only reading it because the other person insisted or it was necessary for your job, you might charge something, but not $950 an hour!
If your time’s so valuable, get an employee to read the article and summarize it for you at a tiny fraction of your hourly rate.
But no, Mikal Watts can’t trust his underlings to read newspapers. He has to do it himself – at $950 an hour.
In the Spring, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton reached agreement with county leaders to share $1.5 billion from a nationwide opioid settlement. Having handled many of the opioid suits filed by the counties, Watts filed a time report with the AG’s office itemizing almost 1,500 hours of billable opioid litigation work for a total of nearly $1.4 million.
That included $190 for 12 minutes devoted to reading an article in the New York Times, and $1,045 for the hour-plus it took to read another. That’s just two of many. Watts, apparently, is not a graduate of the Evelyn Wood speed-reading program.
Why rush? The slower he reads, the more he gets paid.