In that case, I suspect it’s the pressure for billable hours that leads those professions to bill in ways that either are sketchy, or seem excessive to the average person.
For example, my wife was told that she could bill while on the throne at work, if she was thinking about a case. Sketchy.
In my own consultant experience, I ultimately got fired because I called out a partner as crooked, because he was pushing to have us use this arcane SQL code formatting standard that would literally take us dozens of extra hours per project in order to get it all just so, when there were automated code formatters that would format the code exactly the same way, every single time in seconds. Maybe not exactly the way these guys wanted it done, but it was SO much faster and SO much more consistent, that the only conclusion I could come to was that these clowns deliberately wanted us spending extra billable time formatting SQL code to an unnecessary and arcane standard so they could bill for it. And in the way the partnership rules worked, they personally profited from those extra hours.
But people don’t like being told that they’re doing something shitty and unethical, especially when an underling is insubordinate in the process, so they let me go.
It’s stuff like that which gives people the perception that these professions are populated by dickheads. Being billed for a 5 minute phone call, or for hours and hours of formatting sql code that could have been done in an automated fashion in seconds are great examples.