Estimate legal service fees from attorney time, paralegal time, and filing costs with a simple blended-staffing worksheet.
This page is a simple worksheet for estimating legal service fees from three major inputs: attorney billing, paralegal support, and filing or court costs. Instead of pretending to quote a real engagement, it helps you turn a rough staffing plan into a first-pass budget.
The model assumes that total work hours are split between attorney time and paralegal time, then adds any filing fees you enter. That makes it useful for comparing simple versus more complex matters and for seeing how staffing changes move the budget, but it is not a quote, a fee agreement, or a statement of what a court will award or shift.
Use it as a planning tool before you compare the result against the actual billing arrangement offered by counsel. Flat-fee, contingency, or capped-fee matters need a different pricing model than the hourly worksheet used here.
A simple legal budget is easier to evaluate when attorney time, support time, and filing costs are kept in one place. This worksheet makes those assumptions visible so you can compare scenarios without turning the page into legal advice or a fake quote engine.
Attorney Fees = Total Hours × 60% × Attorney Rate. Paralegal Fees = Total Hours × 40% × Paralegal Rate. Total = Attorney Fees + Paralegal Fees + Filing Costs.
Result: $5,150 total service cost
With the worksheet split used on this page, attorney time is 15 hours and paralegal time is 10 hours. Attorney fees = 15 × $250 = $3,750. Paralegal fees = 10 × $90 = $900. Filing costs = $500. Total = $5,150.
The main value of this page is speed. If you know the likely hourly rates, a rough total-hour estimate, and the filing costs, you can generate a simple matter budget without pretending that the result is a formal quote.
A case staffed mainly by partners will cost much more than one delegated heavily to paralegals or junior associates. That is why the output is best read as a scenario tool rather than as a universal legal-price benchmark.
Before relying on the total, compare it against the actual engagement letter, scope of work, and billing structure offered by counsel. That is where flat fees, caps, contingency terms, or exclusions will usually matter more than the worksheet assumptions here.
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This page estimates legal-service cost by splitting the entered total hours between attorney time and paralegal time, multiplying those hours by the entered hourly rates, and then adding any filing or court costs. It is a worksheet for rough budgeting, not a quote, a fee agreement, or a statement of what a court will award or shift.
The output depends heavily on the staffing assumption built into the page. Real matters may use a different mix of attorney and support time, and flat-fee, capped-fee, or contingency arrangements require a different pricing model entirely.
It estimates professional legal-service cost from hourly attorney time, hourly paralegal time, and filing fees. It is a budgeting worksheet, not a quote or fee agreement.
The page uses a simple staffing assumption so it can turn one total-hour estimate into a blended professional-fee estimate. Real staffing may be more attorney-heavy, more paralegal-heavy, or not hourly at all.
No. Actual pricing depends on the jurisdiction, the firm, the engagement structure, scope changes, and whether the matter is billed hourly, flat fee, capped fee, or contingency.
Filing fees and court costs are not the same as professional time. Keeping them separate makes it easier to compare different matters and to see what portion of the total is staffing versus mandatory filing expense.
Only loosely. A flat-fee quote bundles scope, risk, and staffing into one number, so this worksheet is best used as a reference point rather than as a direct apples-to-apples comparison.
Treat this result as a rough planning number only. Unusual discovery demands, emergency motion practice, expert work, and multi-party coordination can all make real legal costs diverge sharply from a simple worksheet.