Contractor for Former Employer

I got let go from a dotcom once while I was on vacation. little did the clowns in charge knew, they forgot that I was the only one of two admins left after massive layoffs that knew anything about everything in the company. . the other one was just a tool but he was at the office when they started picking out who to let go so. . whatevs. a little after a week, one of the department heads contacted me, pissed as hell that I was let go (mainly pissed at the upper managements cause his department actually made money) and told them "I need him back to fix this - pay him whatever". music to my ears. I picked a random number between 150-200 and doubled it. I logged EVERY SINGLE THING down to the nearest half hour increment. in the end, I got my severance from the layoff, but I also made 3x my severance from the contract. in terms of legal protection, speaking as not-a-lawyer, I didn't set up anything. everything played out the way it did. there was nothing I did that was illegal. the rate wasn't, the work wasn't. everything was up and up with a signed a pretty open SOW and contract. would I do it again? yeah. that dotcom was just poorly ran and the decisions made was why it failed so hard and why there was so many layoffs. do I regret making them pay the rate? no. if it happened again this time around, and they need help, they'll get my dollar amount and it'll be up to them to figure out whether to pay it or not. as for your friend, if he/she/they is pissed, just log everything and bill EVERY LITTLE THING. if your friend felt underpaid then now is a good time to true up that dollar amount. if I had to read up on something to do, it was logged and billed. if I had to do trial and error, it was logged and billed. you can be as detailed as you want or not, but if not, be prepared to explain the work. letting them burn just means you're leaving a heap of money on the table when you can just burn them and get paid doing it. you can't feed yourself on pride and ego but you sure can with a check with a dollar amount written on it.