{"id":155879,"date":"2026-07-06T14:41:33","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T22:41:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/07\/06\/marc-kasowitz-allegedly-took-a-6-4m-cut-of-columbia-antisemitism-settlement-and-jewish-students-are-pissed\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T14:41:33","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T22:41:33","slug":"marc-kasowitz-allegedly-took-a-6-4m-cut-of-columbia-antisemitism-settlement-and-jewish-students-are-pissed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/07\/06\/marc-kasowitz-allegedly-took-a-6-4m-cut-of-columbia-antisemitism-settlement-and-jewish-students-are-pissed\/","title":{"rendered":"Marc Kasowitz Allegedly Took A $6.4M Cut Of Columbia Antisemitism Settlement And Jewish Students Are Pissed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marc Kasowitz made himself the face of the campus antisemitism fight, filing splashy Title VI suits against Columbia, Harvard, Penn, and NYU on behalf of Jewish students. When his firm settled with Columbia earlier this year<\/a> on behalf of 43 Jewish and Israeli students, the announcement bragged about major concessions, including a Title VI coordinator, a nod toward the IHRA definition. The amount of the settlement remained confidential, but seems to be somewhere north of $10 million\u2026 and we know this because many of those Jewish students are now suing Kasowitz<\/a> claiming he pocketed more than half the settlement as part of his $6.4M fee.<\/p>\n

Normally, these stories about lawyers making too much money are dumb handwringing<\/a>. Phony populism from publications like the New York Post, riling up their audience to hate the egghead lawyers collecting a couple million for elite legal services while cheerleading the president who just happens to be making hundreds of millions on a crypto rug pull. Bad mouthing legal fees is also a shameless tactic of corporate grifters trying to cast attorneys as greedy for taking on the financial risk of a class action.<\/p>\n

That said, those lawyers speaking truth in the face of corporate injustice generally take \u2014 at most \u2014 a third of the settlement and often much less. By contrast, according to Law.com<\/a>, Kasowitz\u2019s payout came out to \u201can amount that one student described in an email with [Kasowitz partner Jillian] Roffer as \u2018around 60% of the settlement.\u2019\u201d The rest of the funds, according to the complaint<\/a>, were \u201callegedly\u00a0distributed \u2026 through a secretive non-appealable process and threatened that students who refused to sign the deal would have to proceed without his firm\u2019s representation.\u201d Individual awards ranged, per the suit, from $34,000 to $300,000. There was allegedly no explanation why one student was getting nearly ten times more than another.<\/p>\n

Kasowitz\u2019s firm calls the suit a heap of \u201cgross misrepresentations and false claims,\u201d and points out that the plaintiffs \u201csigned releases and fully accepted all the benefits\u201d of a historic settlement. Yeah, but about those releases\u2026 the complaint alleges that students were handed sweeping releases from Kasowitz that \u201cdemanded signatures in five days, by December 26, during the Christmas holiday.\u201d Which seems like awkward phrasing for a complaint on behalf of Jewish students. I mean\u2026 \u201cthe winter holiday\u201d is perfectly acceptable phrasing. Is this a meta commentary on how deeply ingrained antisemitism is?<\/p>\n

When the clients asked to see the bills, the firm allegedly declined, and then kept declining, before eventually producing a \u201csummary\u201d \u2014 which is the bitchiest of lawyerly moves. That summary claimed more than 7,700 hours of work, with Kasowitz\u2019s own time billed at $2,500 an hour. The total fees aren\u2019t necessarily unreasonable for a case requiring 7,700 hours \u2014 it works out to under a $900\/hour average per timekeeper. Except the Columbia case, the plaintiffs note, settled before a single deposition or any formal discovery. <\/p>\n

The lawsuit says the retainer told these students that a third party would cover the legal fees, but that didn\u2019t work out in practice. Miles Rubin, a Columbia grad and former IDF reservist who lost friends on October 7, describes Kasowitz treating the case as \u201chis own personal piggy bank.\u201d Noah Miller, who finished at Columbia\u2019s architecture school in 2025, said he realized he was \u201ca pawn to Kasowitz rather than an actual plaintiff.\u201d The complaint\u2019s own framing is that students who had already endured harassment on campus never expected to be \u201ctaken advantage of by the very lawyers they trusted to protect them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this is all unsurprising. The fight against genuine campus antisemitism seemed to quickly escalate to opportunistic ax grinding. The Trump administration used it to seek a federal curriculum takeover and control over faculty hiring<\/a>. They used it as a predicate to slash federal grants. At Penn, the administration used it to demand a list of Jewish employees<\/a> \u2014 and historically \u201cgovernment demands a list of Jewish people\u201d isn\u2019t an encouraging development. Biglaw mostly used it as an excuse to preen for the administration<\/a>. At every turn, what happened on these campuses meant more to powerful people as a means to other ends. It wasn\u2019t inevitable<\/em> that a group of students and their own lawyer would end up aligned against each other amid allegations of bad faith dealing, but when you look at everything else that\u2019s going on, the odds were always pretty good. <\/p>\n

Marc Kasowitz Faces Malpractice Suit Over Columbia Antisemitism Settlement<\/a> [Law.com]
Lawyer for Columbia University\u2019s Jewish students netted $6.4M payday while preying on own clients: lawsuit<\/a> [NY Post]<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Marc Kasowitz Allegedly Took A $6.4M Cut Of Columbia Antisemitism Settlement And Jewish Students Are Pissed<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMarc Kasowitz (Photo by Jim Watson\/AFP\/Getty Images)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Marc Kasowitz made himself the face of the campus antisemitism fight, filing splashy Title VI suits against Columbia, Harvard, Penn, and NYU on behalf of Jewish students. When his firm settled with Columbia earlier this year<\/a> on behalf of 43 Jewish and Israeli students, the announcement bragged about major concessions, including a Title VI coordinator, a nod toward the IHRA definition. The amount of the settlement remained confidential, but seems to be somewhere north of $10 million\u2026 and we know this because many of those Jewish students are now suing Kasowitz<\/a> claiming he pocketed more than half the settlement as part of his $6.4M fee.<\/p>\n

Normally, these stories about lawyers making too much money are dumb handwringing<\/a>. Phony populism from publications like the New York Post, riling up their audience to hate the egghead lawyers collecting a couple million for elite legal services while cheerleading the president who just happens to be making hundreds of millions on a crypto rug pull. Bad mouthing legal fees is also a shameless tactic of corporate grifters trying to cast attorneys as greedy for taking on the financial risk of a class action.<\/p>\n

That said, those lawyers speaking truth in the face of corporate injustice generally take \u2014 at most \u2014 a third of the settlement and often much less. By contrast, according to Law.com<\/a>, Kasowitz\u2019s payout came out to \u201can amount that one student described in an email with [Kasowitz partner Jillian] Roffer as \u2018around 60% of the settlement.\u2019\u201d The rest of the funds, according to the complaint<\/a>, were \u201callegedly\u00a0distributed \u2026 through a secretive non-appealable process and threatened that students who refused to sign the deal would have to proceed without his firm\u2019s representation.\u201d Individual awards ranged, per the suit, from $34,000 to $300,000. There was allegedly no explanation why one student was getting nearly ten times more than another.<\/p>\n

Kasowitz\u2019s firm calls the suit a heap of \u201cgross misrepresentations and false claims,\u201d and points out that the plaintiffs \u201csigned releases and fully accepted all the benefits\u201d of a historic settlement. Yeah, but about those releases\u2026 the complaint alleges that students were handed sweeping releases from Kasowitz that \u201cdemanded signatures in five days, by December 26, during the Christmas holiday.\u201d Which seems like awkward phrasing for a complaint on behalf of Jewish students. I mean\u2026 \u201cthe winter holiday\u201d is perfectly acceptable phrasing. Is this a meta commentary on how deeply ingrained antisemitism is?<\/p>\n

When the clients asked to see the bills, the firm allegedly declined, and then kept declining, before eventually producing a \u201csummary\u201d \u2014 which is the bitchiest of lawyerly moves. That summary claimed more than 7,700 hours of work, with Kasowitz\u2019s own time billed at $2,500 an hour. The total fees aren\u2019t necessarily unreasonable for a case requiring 7,700 hours \u2014 it works out to under a $900\/hour average per timekeeper. Except the Columbia case, the plaintiffs note, settled before a single deposition or any formal discovery. <\/p>\n

The lawsuit says the retainer told these students that a third party would cover the legal fees, but that didn\u2019t work out in practice. Miles Rubin, a Columbia grad and former IDF reservist who lost friends on October 7, describes Kasowitz treating the case as \u201chis own personal piggy bank.\u201d Noah Miller, who finished at Columbia\u2019s architecture school in 2025, said he realized he was \u201ca pawn to Kasowitz rather than an actual plaintiff.\u201d The complaint\u2019s own framing is that students who had already endured harassment on campus never expected to be \u201ctaken advantage of by the very lawyers they trusted to protect them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this is all unsurprising. The fight against genuine campus antisemitism seemed to quickly escalate to opportunistic ax grinding. The Trump administration used it to seek a federal curriculum takeover and control over faculty hiring<\/a>. They used it as a predicate to slash federal grants. At Penn, the administration used it to demand a list of Jewish employees<\/a> \u2014 and historically \u201cgovernment demands a list of Jewish people\u201d isn\u2019t an encouraging development. Biglaw mostly used it as an excuse to preen for the administration<\/a>. At every turn, what happened on these campuses meant more to powerful people as a means to other ends. It wasn\u2019t inevitable<\/em> that a group of students and their own lawyer would end up aligned against each other amid allegations of bad faith dealing, but when you look at everything else that\u2019s going on, the odds were always pretty good. <\/p>\n

Marc Kasowitz Faces Malpractice Suit Over Columbia Antisemitism Settlement<\/a> [Law.com]
Lawyer for Columbia University\u2019s Jewish students netted $6.4M payday while preying on own clients: lawsuit<\/a> [NY Post]<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marc Kasowitz made himself the face of the campus antisemitism fight, filing splashy Title VI suits against Columbia, Harvard, Penn, and NYU on behalf of Jewish students. When his firm settled with Columbia earlier this year on behalf of 43 Jewish and Israeli students, the announcement bragged about major concessions, including a Title VI coordinator, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155879\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}