>Doesn't this take money away from your firm?
No, because we are in fact competing on cost and client-recognized quality, and to a lesser extent time. Plus our fees are driven more by the market than by our actual costs, so if we billed fewer hours, we would simply bill at a higher rate to reach the same expected fee while still maintaining our position in the marketplace. Or if we could reduce our fee, we might be able to win more market share.
The pejorative term in the industry for padding billing with useless busy work is "fee justification," which really shouldn't ever be necessary. Especially in my practice area, because there's always more work that can be done to flesh out our deliverables, which in turn makes them more effective for convincing the IRS (or state equivalent) or an appeals judge. When I say I've cut thousands of dollars of charge hours, we didn't simply stop charging those hours, we allocated them to more useful, value added activities.
Right now, staff spend far too much time inefficiently manipulating data in Excel, manually organizing exhibits, and a variety of other mundane, low cognitive effort tasks (I can't really specify what kinds because that would essentially doxx me). They feel productive, they look productive, and they meet their charge hour goals. And it allows them to procrastinate on the more mentally taxing work, like evaluating the relevant legal and technical tax issues, which in turn detracts from the quality of our service. Our clients aren't paying us to be extra-expensive outsourced spreadsheet monkeys. They're paying us to eliminate uncertainty about complicated legal and tax issues. So freeing up engagement budget and the staff's mental bandwidth to focus on the high value added cognitive services is tremendously useful in improving quality.
And in terms of time, we compete on that in some cases where there's an audit, exam, or appeal deadline and the client came to us late in the game. But that's an edge case and relatively rare. Certainly having a reputation for being quick, efficient, and timely wouldn't hurt our market position, though.