One of chef Gordon Ramsay's signature dishes is lobster ravioli with celery root cream and shellfish vinaigrette. If you were to hire Ramsay to come and make that dish for a dinner party at your house, I'd guess his hourly rate would be pretty high.

Now suppose you hired Ramsay, but instead of a dinner party it was for your kid's birthday party--and all you want Ramsay to do is boil Oscar Meyer hot dogs and serve then on Safeway hot dog buns with Heinz Ketchup (and only that) on them, and later scoop some store-bought ice cream onto store-bought cake.

This is something you could hire a neighborhood teen to do for $20. Do you think Ramsay is going to do it for $20, because you are asking him to do something much simpler than make his signature food?

Of course not. He's charging for his talent and skill. If you want to misuse that by having him work on something that is trivial and can be done easily by someone with much less talent or skill, that's your problem.

I suspect that's what you are doing with the lawyer. A partner in a major firm has the skill and talent to work on very large and complicated matters that involve big companies and a lot of money--things like major mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, and such.

You are asking him for something that could probably be drafted by a paralegal from his office, and then checked over by a junior associate--the legal equivalent of boiling hot dogs.