What's the difference between a rooster and a lawyer? A rooster clucks defiance, while a lawyer f***s de clients

Lawyer for Columbia University’s Jewish students netted $6.4M payday while preying on own clients: lawsuit

A high-profile lawyer who became one of the nation’s most prominent advocates for Jewish college students after Oct. 7 netted a whopping $6.4 million payday from a settlement with Columbia University — by preying on his own clients, a shocking new lawsuit claims.

Marc Kasowitz’s firm had represented 43 Jewish and Israeli students who alleged Columbia failed to protect them during the violent anti-Israel protests and encampments that engulfed the Ivy League campus in Manhattan after the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks on Israel.

The plaintiffs said that at first, they were thrilled to be repped by Kasowitz, a veteran Manhattan litigator who was the legal face of a national campaign against campus antisemitism.

“When Kasowitz rode in on his white horse and was like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna fix this and make this right,’ I was like, ‘Hell, yeah,’ ” said Miles Rubin, a 31-year-old Columbia graduate and former Israel Defense Force reservist whose friends were killed during Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault, to The Post.

Kasowitz’s firm eventually reached a confidential mega-settlement with Columbia over the students’ accusations earlier this year, according to the new lawsuit, which was filed in Manhattan Supreme Court on Sunday.

But Kasowitz then allegedly refused to give the plaintiffs his firm’s billing records from their case, while his cut totaled more than $6.4 million — well over half the settlement’s total payout, court documents claimed.

The top lawyer also allegedly distributed the remaining settlement proceeds through a secretive non-appealable process and threatened that students who refused to sign the deal would have to proceed without his firm’s representation, according to the complaint.

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According to the new lawsuit, the student plaintiffs were told a third party would cover their legal fees, then were given just five days over the Christmas holiday to sign sweeping releases of their claims.

Only after signing did many learn how much they would actually receive — awards that ultimately ranged from $34,000 to $300,000 — leaving them with no opportunity to reject the settlement or challenge the firm’s allocation of the money, their suit alleges.

The complaint alleges that the remaining settlement funds were divided through a secretive, non-appealable process that offered no explanation for why one student received nearly nine times as much as another.

The lawsuit also challenges the firm’s billing records, alleging Kasowitz refused repeated requests for detailed invoices before eventually producing only a summary claiming more than 7,700 hours of legal work and listing his own billing rate at $2,500 an hour.

The plaintiffs contend in their suit that the firm never produced the underlying bills supporting its more than $6.4 million fee.

They allege in their suit that the firm’s related work hours and fees were “inflated and false,” noting the Columbia case settled before depositions or formal discovery.

Noah Miller, a plaintiff who graduated from Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in 2025, said he trusted the firm’s assurances that someone else would pay the legal bills.

“I signed a retainer that said that a third party was paying for everything,” Miller, 28, claimed to The Post.

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Lawyer Susan Chana Lask, who filed the new lawsuit against Kasowitz and his firm on behalf of the students, said the case boils down to a simple proposition.

“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 also blasted the firm’s claimed billing records, claiming no court overseeing a civil rights case would approve rates as high as those claimed by Kasowitz.

“If any court sees this, and they will, there is no court that I believe would allow $2,500 an hour,” said Lask, a veteran civil rights litigator who has argued landmark civil rights cases in both the US Supreme Court and the Second Circuit.