Every pirate story needs righteous outlaws

When Sea Tow filed its $1.5 million federal suit against a family renting their home, the conventional ending was already written: the defendants run out of money, and the case ends by attrition. That is the one condition “Chaos Law” needs to work — the other side has to pay by the hour. Rosen Karol Salis, PLLC broke that equation. Per the newsletter’s reporting, the firm took the Jaeger case on contingency: no fees unless they win. Every additional motion, every subpoena wave, every extension request stopped being a financial weapon and started becoming more evidence for the very counterclaims the Jaegers filed.

The firm, per the public record

Rosen Karol Salis is a boutique franchise-law firm at 110 East 59th Street in Manhattan; the firm and its predecessors have practiced franchise law for more than thirty-five years, representing clients in the tri-state area and nationwide. Founding partner Richard L. Rosen’s honors, per the firm’s site, include Best Lawyers in America, Super Lawyers, the Franchise Times’ “101 Best Franchise Lawyers in America,” charter membership in the Franchise Times “Hall of Fame” of franchise attorneys, and multiple Franchise Attorney of the Year designations. In other words: when the Jaegers needed someone who knew exactly what a franchise is under the law — against a company insisting for forty years that it isn’t one — they found a crew that has spent its entire career on that question.

The record in this case

Richard L. Rosen, John A. Karol, Leonard S. Salis, and Brian C. Looser have matched Sea Tow’s litigation machine filing for filing through six years in the Eastern District of New York. The counterclaims they built put the New York Franchise Sales Act at the center of the case; Judge Seybert’s ruling that the alleged fees fit “comfortably within” the statutory definition of a franchise fee ECF No. 216 followed. When Sea Tow served 17 non-party subpoenas in a Friday-afternoon ambush — 23 deposition targets against a court limit of 10 — the firm filed an emergency motion for a protective order DE 311 · Feb. 18, 2026, and Magistrate Judge Locke stayed the entire campaign the next day. The stay proved temporary — on February 25 the court overruled the objections and let the subpoenas proceed under strict, court-imposed confidentiality DE 314 — but the firm’s more durable procedural win came earlier: in March 2021 the court adopted the Jaegers’ proposed protective order outright over Sea Tow’s competing version DE 102. The renewed bid for summary judgment on liability now sits with Judge Kuntz.

The dispatches call them the Privateers — sailing under letters of marque from a family that could never have afforded this fight by the hour. Everything above is drawn from public court filings and the firm’s own published materials; the firm does not endorse, and is not affiliated with, this newsletter.