question: I want to be able to track expenses that occur over a period of time and are related to a specific project (i.e legal fees over a course of several months). Basically it is possible to build a project for a legal case and then code expenses to that project so it can easily be referenced what was spent on that case?

What @KevinJ of Kansas said. But I’d like to add the following as it is not intuitive and you’ll end up in a similar mess of false assumptions that my team is trying to get out of: You can’t track expenses (besides labor) at the task level. Only at the project level. So if you anticipate tracking/budgeting expenses at a task/milestone/deliverable level within a project you’ll want to set up multiple projects to do just that.