Back in 2003 a child was born in Stamford Hospital with cerebral palsy requiring a lifetime of care. The family hired the Koskoff law firm to sue the hospital. Joel Lichtenstein and Kathleen Nastri were assigned to the case. The Koskoff law firm had the family sign a sliding scale contingency fee agreement, which limited what attorneys could charge clients in personal injury cases. The Koskoff fee agreement had a provision that said if the CT legislature passed a law to opt out of the attorney fee cap, the sliding scale would no longer be applicable and Koskoff would earn a flat 28% contingency fee. Two years later, in 2005 Koskoff lobbied the legislature and got them to change the law to allow personal injury attorneys to have clients opt out of the sliding scale, so the attorney fee caps were apparently no longer in effect for the family, at least according to Koskoff, but not according to attorney Howard Altschuler, who came on the scene a few years later to represent the family in a fee dispute with Koskoff and Day Pitney, who was hired to set up a trust for the family.

The Koskoff attorneys tried the medical malpractice case before a jury which ended in a hung jury. A few years later the case was tried again and Attorney Kathleen Nastri at the Koskoff firm got the jury to award the family $54 million, the largest verdict of its kind in CT history. Nastri had earlier filed an “offer of judgment” to settle the case for $3M, which means that if the hospital refused to pay the settlement offer, and the verdict ended up more than the settlement offer, the Plaintiff would be entitled to interest on the judgment for every year that the settlement offer was rejected. In this case the two trials dragged out the case for about ten years, which meant the Plaintiff was able to add another $62 million in interest to the judgment, bringing the total judgement up to about $116 million.

The problem was that Stamford Hospital only had $3 million in insurance coverage. Koskoff ended up negotiating with the insurance company to pay the family $25 million. After that things took a bizarre turn. The family contacted an attorney from East Haven named Howard Altschuler. Howard was licensed to practice in New York and Connecticut in State and Federal courts and had decades of experience practicing law. Howard advised the family that Koskoff and superstar tv lawyer Brad Gallant from Day Pitney, who was hired to handle the Probate matters involving setting up trusts for the child, were crooks who stole millions of dollars from the family. Howard didn’t mince words. He called them criminals and reported them to the Bar authorities and the State’s Attorney’s Office. Howard’s claims were reported all over the news at the time yet nobody sued Howard for slander or defamation. I guess attorneys were not as sensitive back in those days, unlike today, where members of the Bar get very upset if you write about them in a blog. Cry me a river!

Attorney Altschuler sued Koskoff and Day Pitney on behalf of this family for years, and even sued the CT Bar authorities for not disbarring these alleged “crooks.” Koskoff got these lawsuits thrown out by Judge Barbara Bellis, the “Queen of Mean” who files grievances at the drop of her witch hat against attorneys every day. Bellis referred everything to binding arbitration as there was a binding arbitration agreement in the contingency fee agreement. Altschuler tried to get the binding arbitration agreement thrown out, but had no such luck. The arbitrator spent almost a month, at $550 an hour, analyzing the fee agreement and listening to the family and the attorneys testify about their understanding of the fee agreement. The Arbitrator found nothing wrong with the fee agreement and found in favor of Koskoff. Day Pitney quietly settled for an undisclosed amount. This is what Norm Pattis had to say about Judge Bellis after she suspended him from the Bar, which was eventually overturned on appeal: “my law license was suspended for six months by the same Connecticut judge who presided over the judicial train wreck involving Alex Jones… The judge is stunned by my misconduct. Me, I am stunned the state trusts her with a robe and a gavel. Folks are afraid of this judge, and not for good reason.  Why would the judge do this? I think Emerson teaches why: ‘When you strike at a king, you must kill him.’ The same, apparently, applied to queens…  We’re preparing to appeal the $1.5 billion default judgment against Jones, a case we believe this judge butchered with her rulings.  She got her revenge.”   

Day Pitney is the most politically connected law firm in the Blue state of blue bloods in Connecticut. Koskoff has also become a very politically active firm recently, and has poached a lot of prominent lawyers from other law firms, such as a few attorneys from Jacobs, Grudberg, Belt & Dow. Koskoff hired CT State Rep Matt Blumenthal, who is the son of the politically powerful Richard Blumenthal. Koskoff is growing by leaps and bounds. Koskoff also hired high profile former DOJ prosecutor Christopher Mattei who sued Alex Jones on behalf of Sandy Hook families who were harassed by Jones’ followers. Mattei won a billion dollar hearing in damages verdict against Jones. But he didn’t receive much money as Jones filed for bankruptcy. What is most bizarre about the Alex Jones case is that Sandy Hook families were harassed, and even assaulted by Jones’ followers. Some had to move out of town and change their names. Alex Jones was never subjected to a criminal investigation, State or Federal as far as I can tell, unlike a disgruntled disabled 67 year old retired Naval officer Paul Boyne, who wrote a blog doxing CT family court judges whom he believed destroyed his family and ruined his life. Boyne got extradited from the State of Virginia and tried and convicted by a New Haven jury and sentenced to 20 years in prison by Judge Peter Brown. Boyne’s blog never resulted in anyone being assaulted or harassed. Nobody suffered physical injury. The same Judge Peter Brown sentenced a pedophile to 30 years in prison who was convicted of repeatedly raping two individuals from the age of 8 to the age of 18. Judge Brown sentenced a man named Daniel Cervoni to only 30 months of incarceration for raping a Quinnipiac student while she was passed out and helpless. Judge Brown recently sentenced one Corey Booker to five years of incarceration after a jury found him guilty of repeatedly sexually molesting a girl from the age of 6 to the age of 14. I haven’t seen anyone sentenced to 20 years for doxing judges, in any case, State or Federal.

Every trial lawyer knows that you can try the same case ten times to ten different juries and get ten different results. But every trial lawyer thinks that after they won a case it was their brilliance that won the case, and not just dumb luck, or dumb jurors. Of course when Koskoff spends hundreds of thousands of dollars, and countless man hours on a case and ends up with a defendant’s verdict, the big goose egg, which is not uncommon, its always the dumb jurors fault. Recently the youngsters at Koskoff won a huge $15M verdict for a 78 year old woman who lost sight in one eye after surgery at Yale New Haven Hospital. $15M for one eye for a lady with no life expectancy! Runaway verdict! They also alleged she suffered dementia, and related problems, and she already didn’t have much vision in the other eye, so she was left blind. Either way, it was an insane verdict. In this case, as in the case involving Altschuler, Koskoff also made a $3M offer to settle, which was rejected. The rejection of the offer means that Koskoff added another $6.6 M to the judgement, for a total judgment against Yale calculated of $21M. The plaintiff is now 85 years old. The case was handled by the younger guys in the office, ie., Matthew Blumenthal and Josh Koskoff, the grandson of the great Ted Koskoff. I heard that they have been courting the 85 year old woman who just won the $21M. Bunch of gold diggers!

The Koskoff law firm was started by Ted Koskoff almost a hundred years ago in Bridgeport. Ted Koskoff was a criminal defense attorney who represented the Black Panthers in the 1970s. He was probably appointed a special public defender at the time. Back in those days lawyers made less money than plumbers. Koskoff eventually formed Koskoff, Koskoff & Beider, with his son Michael, who recently passed away, and was one of the few law firms at the time that hired Jews. Jews welcome here. Now Koskoff has more goyim in the office than the Pope has in the Vatican. Koskoff even hired a prominent African American attorney, Preston Tisdale, former chief of the Public Defender’s Office. What does Tisdale know about medical malpractice? I assume not so much, but he has many connections with the CT Bar, serving on all kinds of “important” committees, non-profits and foundations. I remember when young Preston was working his way up the legal ladder interviewing psychotics in the basement holding cells of the court houses, while trying to curry favor with the mental patients who ran the CT Bar above ground in the courtrooms.

The State of Connecticut hired me for many years as a special public defender. I worked for the same gang as Preston, although the Public Defender’s Office didn’t have the same kind of power as the State’s Attorneys Office, where prosecutorial misconduct is rampant, and crooked cops operated for decades with impunity under the “watchful” eyes of judges and prosecutors. The crooked cops, who everyone knew were crooked, I knew some of these guys back in the day, are now costing cities hundreds of millions of dollars in wrongful conviction cases. The Public Defenders office is controlled by the Judiciary, who have a lot of power over the hiring and firing of chief prosecutors. The Judiciary is top heavy with former prosecutors, yet their typically “rigid” reasoning applies to all areas of the law, not just criminal, in which they have no experience. In the criminal field, in which they have the most experience, they tend to trample on the public’s constitutional rights all the time. Three members of the CT Supreme and appellate courts are former prosecutors, a Black woman, a Black man and a White female, while the chief court administrator is a former female prosecutor. Talk about diversity! The CT Bar consists of thousands of members with diverse backgrounds in the law, some are even musicians and former actors, yet why do the most powerful people in the Court system wear jackboots? The Public Defenders Office has the power to shut down the system. Claim every case to the trial list and the system grinds to a halt. Yet they do nothing to stand up to the police state. Ted Koskoff is rolling in his grave, while his media savvy heirs to the thrown are laughing all the way to the bank. Accident? Injury? Call Koskoff! Why isn’t Preston on the bench wearing the “old Mother Hubbard?” A former Black male public defender on the Bench would be too much for the overlords to handle.

Altschuler alleged in his numerous grievances that Day Pitney and Koskoff were in a conspiracy to rob the family of millions. None of the charges stuck other than a public reprimand issued against attorney Nastri for her failure to honor the original fee agreement, which made no sense because Koskoff honored the original fee agreement, in my opinion. I was disappointed that I couldn’t uncover a crime committed by these egotistical attorneys. This is what Altschuler alleged against Koskoff and Day Pitney in court documents: “attorneys from Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder and Day Pitney criminally conspired to keep a retainer agreement out of the hands of the Norwalk and Northern Fairfield probate courts to hide the contingency fee terms from the courts through a series of maneuvers, machinations, and fraud on the court and the clients… Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder also charged more than $600,000 in litigation expenses for which Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder had no original invoices or proof that these expenses were valid or accurate, among other things. Day Pitney unnecessarily would be paying the Day Pitney respondents approximately up to $65,000 per year in trustee fees, potentially for decades, though there was no necessity or advantage for the Day Pitney attorney to be the trustee. One of the Day Pitney respondents created a foundation that would likely be funded with five million or more dollars and controlled by the Day Pitney respondent or his successor, who would thereafter receive unspecified legal fees ‘forever.’ These were serious allegations of criminal activity against these well-known and well connected attorneys meriting a competent investigation…”

Day Pitney is probably the most politically connected law firm in the State, with close ties to the Blue State bluebloods such as Greenwich governor Ned Lamont. Retired CT Supreme Court Justice Richard A. Robinson is a partner at Day Pitney. Robinson was recently the subject of an ethics complaint, in which he admittedly worked on a case as an attorney for Day Pitney in which he had also presided over as a Supreme Court Justice some years back. He admitted that what he did was wrong, yet he was not subjected to long and protracted disciplinary proceedings, unlike other attorneys, such as myself and attorney John Mills, who merely criticized Judicial decisions, yet the Judicial disciplinary officers sought to suspend his license. The CT Supreme Court sent a very strong message to attorneys in the Mills case: you don’t bite the hand that holds your Bar license. Whatever happened to the First Amendment adage, coined by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”

Koskoff never sued Altschular for defamation, but made the following complaints in court filings: “the highly publicized civil lawsuit and now this grievance complaint is [sic] based on the Complainants’ false premise that the Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder lawyers are criminals.… Attorney Altschuler claims that Kathleen Nastri, James Horwitz, Michael Koskoff, William Bloss, and Joel Lichtenstein stole five million from the D’Attilo family and then formed a conspiracy with Attorney Gallant to hide their criminal acts.”

Howard Alan Altschuler died in 2023 without a mention on the Internet. No obituary. Nothing. A psychologist from Kentucky named Melody Altschuler opened an estate for Howard in the East Haven Probate Court. Howard is listed as owning a house in East Haven jointly with a guy named Richard Civie. Howard represented Civie in a case back in 2014 that got thrown out on appeal. Melody has not attempted to sell Howard’s interest in the East Haven house, they own as joint tenants, with no right to survivorship. There is another Altschuler law firm in West Haven, not sure if they are related to Howard. There is a guy named Milo Altschuler who resigned from the CT Bar after he allegedly sexually assaulted some of his clients in the courthouse. Milo passed away this past May and was buried in the B’nai Jacob cemetery in Woodbridge. After the funeral a party was held at his favorite pizza joint, ie., Bar on Crown Street in New Haven. Many members of the CT Bar are actively praying for my premature death. I have news for you: my great grandfather Nathan Drellich lived til he was 95 years old running his sewing machine repair shop on Canal Street on the Lower East Side. I have good genes. I still have another 35 years to write this blog. I ain’t going anywhere anytime soon!