The economics of most employment is a tradeoff between how much value you add to the equation and how much you can extract (you can also participate with resource depletion and leveraging of starting capital, but for most employees value insertion vs value extraction is the main issue).

Are you a nontechnical sales drone who can't figure out when your product fits the requirements, but you are a mandatory middleman between a company who really needs your product and someone (or many someones) who built something really valuable? You can extract a commission of a few percent of the vast amount of value that flows past you, which may be far in excess of the value you provide.

Are you a subject-matter expert in a cubicle farm full of other SMEs? You may be contributing far in excess of the value you provide, because you just don't have any leverage to extract any of it.

When a court only has time for a few hours of testimony to help decide a case worth hundreds of millions regarding some enterprise that's affected millions of people over many years, that's a recipe for value extraction far in excess of the normal value of an hour.