OT: Need advice on dealing with unreasonable attorney fees

[iamconfused]

Long time user here... posting on my burner account in order to remain anonymous...

I hate to have to ask here, but I love you guys, and maybe someone has been in a similar situation and can shed some light on what I can do here...

Long story short, im in the middle of a divorce, and I just fired my second attorney (who im referring to in this post). Right before I let him go, I got an invoice for past services. Here's the run-down:

-Hired this guy in January to take over my first attorney. Paid his $7,500 retainer.

-Got a bill mid-March. The date-range for this bill was 2/13 - 3/07 and the total amount was $4,400, which depleted my retainer, so after retainer was exhausted, I owed $1,900. So im in with this guy at this point for $9,400..

-A fact I think is relevant.. on Tax Day, I let my attorney know that i needed to sell my car in order to pay a huge(almost 5-figure) IRS bill due to getting screwed over by my soon-to-be-ex-wife. A few days later, i got a call from my lawyer talking briefly about the case, and then he mentioned that he has been meaning to send over a billing invoice.. I was confused and said I had just paid him the $1,900 from the invoice a month ago. He said he'll get back to me.

-Toward the end of April, I got this invoice.... over $10,000... date range was 3/12 - 4/09... granted we did have to go to court for pre-trial; that was $2140 plus a $9 travel fee... the rest of the line items have vague descriptions like "Contact with counsel", "Contact with client", "Follow up with x". "Prepare", etc... stated 6 line items which included some form of "Preparing for pre-trial" totaling to almost $6k (almost 10 hours billed for pre-trial prep)

My ex/her attorney are being super stubborn and completely unreasonable and my attorney didnt seem too confident about what to do. He only was sure that I "do not want to go to trial", even though I told him that mediation will not work with my ex(I have reasons)....

So I suspect what happened was, he knew I was in a tough place with having to sell my car to pay the IRS, and he threw out this ridiculous bill to me in order to scare me into settling in to the opposing-counsel's unreasonable proposal for resolution... Thats all i could think of... he didn't give me any real warning that a huge bill was coming at all.

To put things in perspective, I had my first attorney($400/hr) for 6 months and he's who filed for my divorce and did all sorts of the initial paperwork and whatnot. In 6 months, i spent $10k on him, and that includes us going to the court one day for almost the same amount of time I was at pre-trial with my second lawyer.. This second attorney($595/hr), I had for roughly 3 months, and after this bill, im at almost $20k!

Is this real life? What can I do to fight this??