The lawyers didn’t get retainers? Other than contingency cases, the ones I knew would get, i.e., $10K retainer that they ‘work down’ till it’s almost used up, then have the retainer ‘refreshed.’ So they are never out their fees.
In a case like this, of course, the numbers would/should be considerably higher, but why did they do all that work without payment up front?
The lawyers all got retainers, and heaps and heaps of additional money (over $ 5 million). After they were paid in full, over $5 million, they created a scheme to take away the rest of this man’s money, claiming that they were not paid. If you read the court documents, you’ll see that the lawyers fabricated this scheme in coordination with the judge. Once the man was prohibited from hiring a lawyer to defend himself, he was repeatedly raped (figuratively).