A prominent Manhattan attorney who became a leading legal advocate for Jewish college students now faces a lawsuit from the very clients he represented.
Marc Kasowitz and his firm had represented 43 Jewish and Israeli students who alleged Columbia University failed to protect them from violent anti-Israel protests following the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks.
The students say they were initially proud to be represented by Kasowitz, a veteran litigator who became the public face of a national campaign against campus antisemitism.
Kasowitz’s firm reached a confidential settlement with Columbia University on behalf of the students, but the terms of that deal have now become the subject of fierce legal dispute.
A new lawsuit filed in New York County Supreme Court alleges Kasowitz took $6.412 million from the settlement proceeds, which plaintiffs claim amounts to well over half of the total payout.
The students allege they had been promised that a third party would cover all legal fees, making the deduction from their settlement a complete and shocking betrayal of their trust.
Plaintiff Noah Miller, a 28-year-old who graduated from Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in 2025, said he relied on assurances the firm had given him before signing. “I signed a retainer that said that a third party was paying for everything,” Miller claimed.
The lawsuit further alleges Kasowitz repeatedly refused to provide detailed billing records before eventually producing only a summary claiming more than 7,700 hours of legal work, with his own billing rate listed at $2,500 an hour.
Plaintiffs contend those hours and fees were “inflated and false,” pointing out that the Columbia case settled before any depositions or formal discovery had taken place.
The complaint also alleges Kasowitz distributed remaining settlement proceeds through a secretive non-appealable process and threatened that students who refused to sign would lose the firm’s representation entirely.
Lawyer Susan Chana Lask, who filed the new lawsuit against Kasowitz on behalf of the students, offered a blunt assessment of what took place. “These students got suckered in,” Lask told The Post. “The retainer said there would be no legal fees. Then they signed away all of their claims before they even knew what they were getting.”
Lask added pointedly: “If any court sees this, and they will, there is no court that I believe would allow $2,500 an hour.”
The complaint states that the plaintiffs “had already endured harrowing antisemitic harassment on campus during the historic unrest following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, but never expected to be taken advantage of by the very lawyers they trusted to protect them.”
Six current and former students involved in the original agreement claim the firm misrepresented the total sum Columbia was to pay and “prevented collective scrutiny over what KBT was doing when it decided to take an enormous and unsubstantiated fee from the students’ settlement.”
A representative for the Kasowitz firm said the malpractice complaint misrepresents the facts of the situation and downplays the substantial benefits secured for the students through the Columbia deal.