Legal

Fees, settlements, billing and the arithmetic around common legal costs. 30 calculators.

The obvious caveat, stated once and properly: nothing here is legal advice, and law varies by country, by state and often by county. These pages do arithmetic on figures you supply. They cannot tell you what a court in your jurisdiction will actually do, and where a calculation depends on local statute the page asks you for the local number rather than assuming one.

Overtime owed is the most useful page here for ordinary people, because the mistake it catches is common and costly. Overtime is calculated on the regular rate of pay, which under US federal rules includes non-discretionary bonuses and shift differentials, not just base hourly. An employee paid $20 an hour plus a $200 production bonus in a 40 hour week has a regular rate of $25, and their overtime is $37.50 an hour, not $30. Payroll systems get this wrong regularly.

Billable hours handles the increment question, which matters more than the rate. Six-minute increments round differently from fifteen-minute ones, and across a year the difference on the same actual work can run to thousands.

Attorney fee pages separate contingency, hourly and flat structures rather than blending them, since the effective cost of each differs enormously by how a matter resolves.