Hunter Shkolnik.

A lawyer accused of unethical conduct in the Flint water case called an attempt to oust him from his leadership appointment “nothing but a retaliatory smear campaign” and a “blatant money grab.”

Hunter Shkolnik, who has been appointed as co-liaison counsel to the individual cases, responded on Monday to accusations made last month by lead attorneys in the class action that he was swiping their clients by forcing Flint residents to sign unlawful retainer agreements with excessive fees. In a court filing, Shkolnik countered that Ted Leopold and Michael Pitt, both appointed as lead counsel to a consolidated class action, have refused to disclose “secret side-fee deals” with other law firms or allowed the court to review billing in the case. He asked U.S. District Judge Judith Levy of the Eastern District of Michigan to remove Leopold, chairman of the catastrophic injury and wrongful death practice at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and Pitt, of Pitt McGehee Palmer and Rivers in Royal Oak, Michigan, from their leadership positions.

“Interim counsel's prosecution of this matter is not about obtaining the necessary evidence to present the best case at trial,” wrote Shkolnik, of Napoli Shkolnik in New York. “Rather, it is about billing hours and carving out fees to the detriment of the putative class.”

Shkolnik serves as co-liaison counsel to the individual cases along with Corey Stern, a partner at Levy Konigsberg in New York. Stern's response is due on April 16.

A Cohen Milstein spokesman wrote in an email: “We will reserve comment on Napoli Shkolnik's inaccurate statements for our next filing. Needless to say, Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll is proud of our important work, our commitment to public service and our reputation as one of the nation's leading plaintiffs' firms, built on decades of success in antitrust, civil rights and employment, consumer protection, securities and a variety of other practice areas.”

Pitt did not respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuits over water contamination in Flint have targeted three engineering firms and more than a dozen government officials over the 2014 decision to temporarily shift the city's water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. The change was made despite studies warning that the corrosive nature of the river water could risk leaching lead from old pipes into Flint's drinking water supply. Elevated levels of lead were identified in Flint water by a team from Virginia Tech.

The Flint litigation has branched into several cases proceeding in different courts with a plethora of claims, from consumer fraud to constitutional allegations. On Monday, for instance, the ACLU of Michigan, the Education Law Center and White & Case reached a partial settlement of a class action against the Michigan Department of Education and others to provide medical screening for children in Flint.

Last summer, Levy appointed Pitt and Leopold as lead counsel for all the class actions in federal court, later consolidated, and Shkolnik and Stern as co-liaison for hundreds of individual cases, most of which involve medical claims. The lawyers have filed separate complaints, but many of their claims have overlapped.

The dispute arose as both sides are meeting with two mediators, one of whom is former U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan. Leopold and Pitt claimed Napoli Shkolnik's retainer agreements violated Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct because they provided a 40 percent contingency based on gross recoveries, rather than the maximum allowed of one-third of net recoveries for personal injury matters.

In Monday's court filing, Shkolnik called the ethics allegations a “complete fabrication.”

“They are designed only to discredit Mr. Shkolnik in the hope that interim counsel can gain complete control of the litigation so that they can line their own pockets,” he wrote. “In short, the motion is nothing more than a blatant money grab.”

He corrected what he called the “harmless error” involving his retainer agreements, he wrote. The motion to remove him, he said, came about after he resisted class counsel's fee demands, which included having every individual lawyer pay them one-third of their fees so that they would receive 80 percent of all common benefit fees. It also required that other lawyers, like Shkolnik, not sign up new clients in Flint.

Those demands, which are unethical, surfaced after Shkolnik criticized agreements they had with other law firms that were engaged in “deliberately opaque billing,” he wrote. “They're claiming that they are doing a mapping of the community,” he said. “This is not a scientific study, and they're billing a gazillion dollars. They're going door to door to ask people about their exposure to lead and lead levels.”

Those activities spurred Shkolnik to request a formal time and expense order be submitted to the court that would include a special master to review submissions, he wrote.

On Monday, Levy filed an agenda for an April 16 status conference that included discussing “the appointment of a certified public accountant to administer and account for time and expense submissions and any common benefit fund created for this litigation.”