Kasowitz Got Paid: His Clients Got Angry

$6.4 million. That is the number at the center of a malpractice complaint that should make every client who has ever signed a contingency agreement sit down and read the fine print they didn't read the first time.

Marc Kasowitz — a name that carries enough weight in American litigation circles to open doors most lawyers knock on twice — is now facing allegations that he took the lion's share of a settlement his clients secured against Columbia University over antisemitism claims. Not a small cut. Not a disputed expense line. The complaint alleges he pocketed the bulk of $6.4 million that his clients believed was theirs. The Kasowitz firm says the complaint misrepresents the facts and undervalues what the Columbia deal actually delivered. That's a defense worth watching, because the answer to "what did the deal actually deliver" is precisely what the malpractice case will turn on.

I'm not here to try Kasowitz. I'm here to teach you what this case is really about, because it isn't about one lawyer and one settlement. It's about a structural problem baked into the relationship between attorneys and clients that most people don't understand until the check arrives and the number looks wrong.

Contingency fee arrangements are one of the most powerful access-to-justice tools in existence. They are also one of the most misunderstood contracts that ordinary people sign. The premise is elegant: the lawyer takes the risk, gets nothing if you lose, and earns a percentage if you win. What most clients never interrogate is the arithmetic around that percentage — and more importantly, what gets deducted *before* the percentage is calculated. Expenses. Disbursements. Administrative costs. Expert fees. In a complex institutional case against a university with a legal team the size of a small country, those deductions can be substantial. And if the retainer agreement doesn't specify with precision how those numbers work, the space between "what the client expected" and "what the client received" can run into seven figures.

In Malta and across the EU, contingency arrangements work differently — and in some jurisdictions, pure contingency fees are either restricted or prohibited entirely. Malta's legal profession operates under the Code of Organisation and Civil Procedure and professional conduct rules that regulate how attorneys charge, and the space for no-win-no-fee structures is narrower than what American clients are accustomed to. But the underlying vulnerability is identical: the client who doesn't understand what they signed is the client who ends up surprised by a number they cannot explain.

I've sat across from people who handed documents to lawyers the way you hand a car to a mechanic — with blind trust and no knowledge of what's under the hood. I understand where that trust comes from. When you are in crisis, when someone you love needs a fighter, you don't read footnotes. You just want someone who can fight. The other side knows this. Sometimes, so does your own lawyer.

The Kasowitz situation also lands in the same week the US Supreme Court closed a term that legal observers are calling one of the more contradictory in recent memory — a court that declared independent federal agencies unconstitutional while simultaneously maintaining that its own independence is, of course, beyond question. The hypocrisy is theatrical. But underneath it is the same structural truth: institutions interpret rules in ways that serve the people running them. That's not cynicism. That's contract law applied to power.

What this means for anyone dealing with a legal matter, in Malta, in the EU, anywhere: the retainer agreement is not a formality. It is the whole game. The billing structure, the expense treatment, the definition of "recovery," the trigger for the fee — these are not administrative details. They are the deal. The written side of every legal engagement contains the terms. The unwritten side contains the assumptions. When those two things diverge, you get a malpractice complaint with a $6.4 million gap at its center.

Your move tomorrow: before you sign any legal retainer — contingency, hourly, fixed fee, or hybrid — ask one question in writing and get the answer in writing. *"Please confirm in writing how legal expenses and disbursements will be deducted, and whether your fee is calculated on gross recovery before or after those deductions."* That one sentence, sent as an email before you sign, creates a paper trail that makes the unwritten side of the deal suddenly very written. It costs you nothing. It could be worth everything.