Legal Question in Legal Ethics in California

Retainer Refund and Billing

I hired an attorney for a case and paid a 25k retainer. In the agreement, it was set up that 10k of that amount was to be put into a trust fund to be used to pay for a trial. It stated that if the case was ended without a trial, then the 10k would be refunded. That is what happened, so I asked my attorney for the money back. She kept trying to talk me into letting her keep some of it, first through a bonus, and then through keeping some of it as a retainer for possible future services. Then she came back and said that she will go through the old accounting and subtract all unpaid fees from it and send me a check for the remainder. She is claiming for the first time all of a sudden that she had preformed tens of thousands of dollars worth of hours 4 years ago beyond what my retainer had covered, but she never got around to adding up the hours. I find it hard to believe. She had never once since retaining her sent me an invoice or accounting, and never once mentioned that the retainer was running low, let alone that I owed her more money - until now. Is this legal? In the agreement it clearly states that the 10k was to be used for a trial only - not pretrial. Is she allowed to claim hours 4 years later that I was never notified of?

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