General billing ideas, each explained the way you would explain them to a friend, then paired with an everyday example. This is general knowledge about how the field works. It is not about your bill.
Each entry has two parts: the general idea, and the same idea in plain terms with an everyday comparison. The comparisons are deliberately about ordinary things (phone bills, mechanics, contractors) so the concept is easy to hold onto. None of this looks at your situation or tells you what anything means for you.
This is general information, like a plain-English reference book. It explains how legal billing generally works. It does not evaluate your bill, it does not tell you whether anything was handled wrongly, and it does not tell you that you have a claim. Whether any idea here relates to your own situation is yours to decide, privately, on your own.
In general, an itemized bill breaks charges into individual entries, each typically showing a date, a description of what was done, and the time or amount for that specific thing, rather than one lump sum.
In plain termsThink of a phone bill that lists every call with its date and length, versus a bill that just says "calls: $400." Both can be for the same total. One lets you see what made it up; the other does not.
"Block billing" is a general industry term for grouping several tasks under a single time entry or a single charge, instead of recording each task separately.
In plain termsLike a contractor writing "worked on house, 8 hours" instead of "framed the north wall 3h, ran wiring 3h, patched drywall 2h." The first is one block; the second is broken out.
In general: an hourly fee charges for time spent; a flat fee is one set price for a defined piece of work; a contingency fee is a pre-agreed percentage payable only if there is a recovery; a retainer is money paid in advance that work is then drawn against.
In plain termsHourly is a mechanic's labor log. Flat is a fixed quote for "replace the brakes." Contingency is "you only pay me a cut if the deal closes." A retainer is a deposit you put on a tab that gets drawn down as things are used.
In general, money a client pays in advance is often expected to be held separately and drawn against as work is actually done, with the client able to see how it was applied.
In plain termsLike leaving a card on file at a hotel: the deposit sits there, charges are supposed to be applied against it as things actually happen, and you can ask for the running total.
In general, "fees" are charges for the work itself, while "costs" or "disbursements" are out-of-pocket amounts paid to third parties (filing fees, couriers, transcripts) and passed through.
In plain termsAt a garage, "labor" is the fee; the new part the shop bought from a supplier and added to your bill is the cost passed through. Different kinds of line, same invoice.
As a general matter, billing-practice norms in the field hold that a client should be able to understand what they were charged for, and that fees are generally expected to be reasonable and documented. New York, for example, has a general client-elected fee-dispute program (22 NYCRR Part 137) that consumers can look up themselves. This is background on how the field generally frames things.
In plain termsMost people expect that if you ask "what exactly did I pay for," there is an answer you can actually follow. That general expectation is the backdrop. What it means for any specific bill is always a specific person's own call.
That is the general vocabulary. The next step, if you want it, is the analogous-situations page: general example situations you can read and decide for yourself, privately, whether anything resembles your own. This page and that one never look at your facts. The connection, if there is one, is always yours to draw.
One flat fee. All of the lessons, this reference, the general example situations, your private workspace to organize your own words, and the general letter framework you use to write your own letter yourself.
This glossary is general education, not legal advice. Legal Fee Recovery is not a law firm and is not a lawyer, and the assistant on this site is an automated AI, not a lawyer. Nothing here evaluates your specific bill or tells you whether you have a claim. You decide everything about your own situation yourself, in your own words.