By Neta, founder of SortMyDivorce · Updated
There is a great deal of published material explaining how legal bills work. Almost all of it is written for lawyers, or for insurance companies. This is the version for the person paying.
| Time entry | A dated line describing a task, the fee earner who did it, and the time charged. |
|---|---|
| Increment | The minimum unit of time charged. Commonly 0.1 hour (6 minutes) or 0.25 hour (15 minutes). Set by your retainer, not by law. |
| Fee earner | Whoever did the work. Partners, associates and paralegals bill at different rates. |
| Block billing | Several tasks grouped under one time figure. Not prohibited, but it prevents you assessing any single task. |
| Disbursement | A third-party cost paid on your behalf — filing fees, couriers, experts, transcripts. Passed through at cost. |
| Attendance | A meeting or call. "Telephone attendance on client" means a call with you. |
| Perusal / consideration | Reading. "Perusal of correspondence" is time spent reading a letter. |
| Trust / retainer account | Money you have paid in advance, held separately and drawn down as fees are billed. |
| What may not be billed | Time not actually spent; the same hour billed to two clients; work recycled from another file; marked-up disbursements. |
Keeping track of dates like these across a stack of letters is exactly what SortMyDivorce does — start a free trial, no card needed.
Search for an explanation of legal billing and you get one of three things: practice-management software vendors explaining billing to lawyers; bill-auditing firms explaining it to insurers and corporate legal departments; or firm blog posts explaining that legal work is expensive.
Nobody explains the invoice to the individual receiving it. That gap is the reason most people either pay without reading or object without specifics, and neither is a good position.
Most family law invoices have four parts.
The narrative or time entries. The bulk of it. Each line has a date, a description, usually initials identifying who did the work, a time figure, and sometimes a rate and a value. This is where your money went.
The fee summary. Total hours by fee earner, multiplied by their rate. Check that this reconciles with the entries above it — the arithmetic is worth two minutes.
Disbursements. Third-party costs, listed separately, usually with a note on whether tax applies.
The account position. What was in your trust or retainer account, what has been drawn down, what remains, and what is now owing. If there is a replenishment threshold in your retainer, this is where you find out you have crossed it.
Firms use a small vocabulary, and it is not obvious from outside.
Perusal / consideration / review of — reading something. Attendance on — dealing with someone. "Attendance on client" is you; "attendance on opposing solicitor" is the other side's lawyer; "attendance at court" is a hearing. Engrossing — preparing a final clean version of a document. Settling — reviewing and finalising a draft, usually by a more senior lawyer. Nothing to do with settlement of the case. Instructing — briefing counsel or an expert. Consideration of file / attention to file — a general entry. Vague, and fair to query if it recurs or carries significant time. Interlocutory — an interim step, before final resolution. Without prejudice — describing correspondence about settlement. What that means legally varies significantly by jurisdiction and is covered in our separate guides.
This is the mechanical fact that explains most of what surprises people about a family law bill.
Time is billed in increments, and each discrete task is rounded up to at least one. A tenth of an hour is six minutes. A quarter of an hour is fifteen.
If your retainer specifies a quarter-hour increment, a ninety-second email acknowledging a date is billed as fifteen minutes. Not because anyone is being dishonest — because that is the agreed unit, and it was in the retainer you signed.
The consequence compounds. Twenty short emails over a month at a quarter-hour increment is five hours. That is five hours of billing, at whatever your lawyer's rate is, for correspondence that took under an hour to write and read. The same twenty emails, batched into four, cost a quarter of that.
Find out what your increment is. It is in your retainer agreement. If you cannot find it, ask — it is a completely ordinary question and the answer changes how you should communicate.
A block-billed entry looks like this:
14 July — Review of correspondence from opposing solicitor; telephone attendance on client; consideration of disclosure schedule; drafting response — 2.4 hours
Four tasks, one number. You cannot tell whether the call took ten minutes or ninety, or whether reading one letter took twenty minutes.
Block billing is not prohibited. It is, however, the single most common reason a bill cannot be assessed by the person paying it, and asking for entries to be broken out by task is entirely reasonable. A firm billing properly will do it.
Phrase it neutrally: "Could I have the 2.4 hours on 14 July itemised by task?" You are asking for detail, not making an allegation.
Four principles, each with a source. They turn "this looks high" into a specific question.
Time not actually spent. ABA Formal Opinion 93-379, issued 6 December 1993, is unambiguous: a lawyer billing hourly "is never justified in charging a client for hours not actually expended."
The same hour, twice. If a lawyer works on your file while waiting on another client's matter, both cannot be billed for that hour. "A lawyer who spends four hours of time on behalf of three clients has not earned twelve billable hours."
Recycled work. Research done for an earlier client and reused on your file cannot be charged again. The lawyer "has not re-earned the hours previously billed and compensated when the work product was first generated."
Marked-up expenses. Disbursements should be passed through at cost. A firm may not add "a surcharge on these disbursements over and above the amount actually incurred" without disclosing it, and if it receives a vendor discount, "it would be improper if she did not pass along the benefit of the discount to her client."
Underlying all of it, ABA Model Rule 1.5 requires that a fee be reasonable, judged against factors including the time and labour required, the difficulty of the questions, the fee customarily charged locally, the amount involved and the result obtained, and the experience and ability of the lawyer.
If you are in New York, domestic relations matters carry additional protection under 22 NYCRR Part 1400: a written retainer is mandatory, itemised bills must be delivered at least every 60 days, and "the client may not be charged for time spent in discussion of the bills received." You can query the bill without paying for the query.
Reconcile the arithmetic. Hours by fee earner times rate should equal the fee total. Errors are not rare.
Check who did what. Look for work done at a senior rate that did not need seniority — collating documents, preparing a bundle, chasing a bank for a statement, routine registry correspondence. This is the most productive question on the list, and the forward-looking version is the least awkward: "For work of this kind in future, could it be handled by [paralegal] at the lower rate?"
Break out the blocks. Any entry over an hour covering multiple tasks.
Look for duplication. Two fee earners on the same call. The same document reviewed twice within a fortnight by different people. Internal conferences billed by both participants. Sometimes justified — always a fair question.
Sanity-check the disbursements. Ask what any large one was for.
Count your own contribution. How many entries are responses to you? How many are short? This is the portion you control, and it is usually bigger than people expect.
Check the account position. Know what is left on account and what triggers a replenishment request, so it does not arrive as a surprise at a bad moment.
Most billing disputes are resolved in one email. The ones that escalate usually do so because of how they were raised, not what was raised.
Be specific — name the entries and dates. Be neutral — you are asking, not accusing. Be forward-looking where you can — asking that a category of work be delegated in future is easier to say yes to than asking for a refund. And separate the query from the payment, unless you have decided to withhold deliberately and understand the consequences.
Subject: Queries on invoice 1042 A few questions on the July invoice, no urgency. 1. The 14 July entry covers four tasks in 2.4 hours — could I have that broken out by task? 2. There appear to be two entries for the 22 July conference call. Is that correct? 3. What was the disbursement charged on 30 July? 4. For future work: could document collation be handled by [paralegal] at the lower rate?
If the firm does not resolve it, there is a formal route in every jurisdiction — fee arbitration in most US states, and a court review or assessment in each Canadian province. The names, bodies and deadlines differ significantly, and we cover them in a separate guide. One thing worth knowing now: in Canada, law societies do not reduce bills. That is a court process, not a complaint process.
Yes. Reading and responding to correspondence is legal work and is billed like any other, usually rounded up to your minimum increment. That is precisely why batching matters.
There is no legal standard. A tenth of an hour is more favourable to the client than a quarter and is common. What matters is that it is disclosed in your retainer and that you know what it is.
Practice varies and it is worth asking. In New York, domestic relations rules specifically prevent you being charged for time spent discussing bills with you.
Estimates are usually just that, and family matters genuinely expand for reasons outside anyone's control. But a large unexplained variance is a fair thing to raise, and a good firm will explain what changed. Ask early rather than after three more invoices.
Get advice before you do. Non-payment can entitle a firm to stop acting, which may leave you unrepresented at a bad moment. Querying and paying are not mutually exclusive, and a query does not become stronger by attaching non-payment to it.
Last reviewed August 2026. Researched and written by Neta, founder of SortMyDivorce. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice — laws, fees and forms change, so please confirm current details with the official sources above or a local family lawyer.
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