Richard C. Litman 459 Vanderbilt Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11238 rclitman@gmail.com
April 10, 2026
VIA EMAIL AND NYSCEF
Aaron H. Gould, Esq. Leo J. Hurley, Jr., Esq. CONNELL FOLEY LLP 185 Hudson Street, Suite 2510 Jersey City, NJ 07311 agould@connellfoley.com lhurley@connellfoley.com
Re: Litman v. Goldberg, Index No. 524343/2025 — Discovery Deficiency Notice Production Deadline: April 10, 2026
Dear Aaron and Leo:
I write pursuant to CPLR 3124 and 22 NYCRR § 202.7 to document the outstanding deficiencies in Defendant's discovery production as of today's date — the date by which you represented, in your March 10, 2026 letter, that Defendant would "substantially complete all rolling productions."
That deadline has now passed. The production made to date is materially incomplete. I set forth the specific deficiencies below and request a meet-and-confer within ten (10) business days pursuant to CPLR 3104 and the Preliminary Conference Order of this Court. If the outstanding materials are not produced, or a production schedule confirmed in writing, within that period, I will have no choice but to move to compel under CPLR 3124 and to seek sanctions under CPLR 3126, including adverse-inference instructions, preclusion of evidence, and costs.
By letter dated March 10, 2026, you committed to making a first rolling production by March 24, 2026, and to substantially completing all rolling productions by April 10, 2026. Pursuant to that commitment, Defendant produced materials on a rolling basis, including a hard drive delivered by FedEx in mid-March 2026. I have reviewed those materials.
The production is deficient in at least ten material respects, each of which was the subject of prior written demands or correspondence. The deficiencies are not marginal; they go to the financial core of this case — the accounting of fees collected on Litman-originated matters, the mechanisms by which Defendant controlled the infrastructure bearing Plaintiff's name, and Defendant's communications with key clients. I address each deficiency in turn.
The production includes a Payment Allocation Report for July 2025 (generated, as metadata confirms, on August 11, 2025 — fully eight months before it was produced). The July report was generated within weeks of Defendant's elimination of my email accounts on July 18, 2025, and was withheld through active discovery until April 7, 2026.
The July 2025 Report reflects a Litman fee-credit allocation of $40,768.39 — the largest single-month allocation to any fee earner on the document. That report's existence, together with Defendant's established cadence of monthly generation, makes it highly probable that Payment Allocation Reports for August 2025 and September 2025 were likewise generated — presumably in September and October 2025, respectively — and have similarly not been produced.
The suppression of the July 2025 report for eight months raises serious concerns that any August and September 2025 reports have been withheld on the same pattern. These reports cover the period immediately following the elimination of my email accounts and the commencement of this litigation and are directly relevant to the damages calculation and Defendant's state of mind. Plaintiff demands immediate production of all Payment Allocation Reports for August 2025 and September 2025, in native format with all metadata intact.
I first requested access to, or a complete report regarding, Customer Number 37833 on or about January 30, 2026. Customer Number 37833 is the USPTO correspondent customer account through which my name appears on all outgoing USPTO correspondence for Litman-originated matters — including the 905 issued patents at the center of this case. This is not a peripheral request.
On February 24, 2026, you declined to provide this access, without any stated basis. My subsequent correspondence, and the Preliminary Conference Order, did not resolve this dispute. The request has now been made at least four times without substantive response.
A customer number report from the USPTO portal is a system-generated document that Defendant either possesses or can obtain in minutes. If Defendant contends that access was previously granted and I could have obtained this information myself, that contention is unsupported. The customer number, and the name associated with it in USPTO records, controls how my professional identity appears on every piece of official USPTO correspondence issued on these matters. Defendant is obligated to produce whatever records it holds reflecting that association and any changes to it. Please confirm in writing whether Defendant will produce this information or will continue to refuse. A continued refusal will be presented to the Court as a ground for sanctions.
The production includes summary-level financial documents but does not include the transaction-level exports from Soluno underlying the 442 individual transactions in the KFU Trust Account (Account 36372) identified in the uncle's forensic summary document — which shows $9,886,482.87 in KFU deposits never allocated to Plaintiff's 20% share and $1,977,296.57 in uncredited allocations across the period January 2023 through November 2024.
The summary-level information provided is insufficient. I require the individual transaction records for Account 36372, including the date, amount, invoice reference, docket number, client identifier, matter code, originating-attorney code, and any associated memo field for each of the 442 transactions. These records are exportable from Soluno and their omission from the production cannot be attributed to burden or inaccessibility. Please produce the complete Soluno transaction-level export for Account 36372 in native format within the period demanded.
The production does not include any Soluno administrative audit logs reflecting (a) changes to originating-attorney codes for Litman-originated matters; or (b) the reassignment of client matters from Litman's attorney number (NGM Attorney Number 418) to alternate numbering schemes — specifically, docket numbers beginning with "1," "J," or "5" — used to route fees collected on Litman-originated matters away from his 20% allocation.
The existence of the renumbering scheme is established by documents already in evidence. The Soluno system maintains an audit trail of every administrative change, including client-number reassignments, originating-attorney code modifications, and matter-identifier changes. Defendant has not produced any such audit trail. I demand production of all administrative audit logs from Soluno (and from its predecessor PCLaw) reflecting any modification to originating-attorney codes, responsible-attorney codes, or client/matter identifiers for any matter previously coded to Richard C. Litman (Attorney Number 418), for the period June 14, 2023 through the present.
The production does not include sub-trust ledger detail for King Faisal University matters for the months of August 2023, May 2024, June 2024, and September 2024 — months in which a forensic reconciliation of the available data identifies an approximate $653,000 gap between fees reflected in the Master Spreadsheet and amounts independently traceable to KFU deposits in the trust register reports.
I demand production of all KFU sub-trust ledger reports, sub-account statements, and individual client ledger cards for Trust Account 36372 for the months of August 2023, May 2024, June 2024, and September 2024. These records are maintained in the ordinary course under VA RPC 1.15 and 37 CFR § 11.115 and must be preserved and produced.
DKIM records independently confirm that the @4patent.com email domain — a domain bearing my name and used exclusively for client-facing and operational communications on Litman-originated matters — is administered through Defendant's Microsoft 365 tenant (nathlaw.onmicrosoft.com). The production contains no Microsoft 365 audit logs reflecting:
(a) the mailbox creation dates for any of the approximately 50 @4patent.com aliases identified in the email metadata;
(b) any sign-in logs for mailboxes or aliases hosted in the nathlaw.onmicrosoft.com tenant;
(c) the alias-to-mailbox redirect configurations in effect during the period June 15, 2020 through the present; or
(d) any administrative actions taken with respect to the litman@4patent.com or rlitman@nathlaw.com mailboxes on or after July 18, 2025.
Microsoft 365 maintains a comprehensive audit log for all mailbox, admin, and compliance events. Defendant, as tenant administrator, has access to this log through the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center. These records are directly relevant to the scope, duration, and administration of the @4patent.com infrastructure — a domain bearing my name — and to the July 18, 2025 email elimination, which I contend constitutes spoliation. Please produce all M365 audit logs for the nathlaw.onmicrosoft.com tenant relating to @4patent.com aliases and the litman@4patent.com and rlitman@nathlaw.com mailboxes from June 15, 2020 through the present.
In correspondence dated February 24, 2026, you acknowledged my statement that "Josh Goldberg used WhatsApp to communicate with KFU" without denying it. Documentary evidence — including emails from April 2023, October 2023, and November 2023 — establishes that KFU communicated with NGM via WhatsApp, and that those communications involved matters on which my name appeared as attorney of record.
No WhatsApp messages have been produced. WhatsApp communications are subject to preservation and production under CPLR Article 31 and are within Defendant's custody and control. I previously demanded their preservation in writing. Please produce all WhatsApp messages, voice messages, and shared media between Joshua B. Goldberg (Reg. 44126) and any representative of King Faisal University — including without limitation Prof. Abdulrahman Al Lily — for the period June 15, 2020 through the present. If these messages have not been preserved, that failure will be addressed as spoliation.
The most recent Payment Allocation Report in Defendant's production covers July 2025 (generated August 11, 2025 and produced, after eight months of withholding, in April 2026). No Payment Allocation Reports have been produced for January 2026, February 2026, or March 2026 — the three months preceding and including today's court-ordered production deadline.
The obligation to produce monthly accountings to Plaintiff is an ongoing one, arising from the June 14, 2023 arbitration award. Reports for these months almost certainly exist, were generated in the ordinary course of NGM's accounting operations, and are responsive to Plaintiff's First Set of Combined Demands (served January 28, 2026). Please produce the January, February, and March 2026 Payment Allocation Reports within five (5) business days.
The Amendment to the Combination Agreement — the foundational contract document bearing on virtually every defense Defendant has asserted — was first requested by Plaintiff approximately in September 2025. It was not produced until the FedEx hard drive delivery in mid-March 2026, approximately seven months later. The document was unquestionably in Defendant's email archive at all times. I note this delay for the record as evidence of a pattern of selective and dilatory production. The document is now in evidence.
The production does not include monthly bank statements for:
These bank statements are necessary to independently verify (a) the trust deposits and trust-to-operating transfers underlying the 69 "uncredited" transfers already identified in the production; (b) whether the $40,768.39 fee-credit reflected in the July 2025 Payment Allocation Report was ever disbursed to Plaintiff; and (c) the volume and pattern of financial activity on Litman-originated matters during the post-litigation-threat period. The Bank of America and Eagle Bank statements are third-party-verifiable records that cannot have been altered by Defendant. Please produce complete monthly statements, including all wire activity reports, deposit advices, and check images, for both accounts for the period July 2025 through March 2026.
Your March 17, 2026 letter contains the following representation: "I note that your access to your two NGM e-mail accounts has never been revoked and you have been able to access these e-mails at all relevant times."
This representation is contradicted by documentary evidence. Text messages dated July 18, 2025 — already in Plaintiff's possession — reflect that Defendant acknowledged the elimination of Plaintiff's email accounts on that date. The elimination occurred one day after Plaintiff issued an explicit litigation threat on July 17, 2025. Independent corroboration is provided by a USPTO-generated notice directed to rlitman@nathlaw.com on August 20, 2025 — more than one month after the claimed elimination — confirming that Litman's name remained the correspondence address of record on at least one federal trademark docket even after access was cut off. This matter will be addressed at Defendant's deposition.
Pursuant to CPLR 3104 and 22 NYCRR § 202.7, I request a meet-and-confer to discuss each of the foregoing deficiencies within ten (10) business days of this letter — that is, no later than April 24, 2026. Please advise of your availability by April 15, 2026.
If Defendant does not produce the outstanding materials or agree in writing to a definite production schedule within that period, I will promptly move to compel under CPLR 3124 and will seek all available remedies under CPLR 3126, including an order of preclusion, adverse-inference instructions, a finding of contempt, and an award of motion costs. I will also seek relief from the Court with respect to the March 10, 2026 commitment, which Defendant has not honored.
I remain willing to resolve these disputes without Court intervention, but only if Defendant acts promptly and in good faith.
Respectfully submitted,
Richard C. Litman
Plaintiff, Pro Se
459 Vanderbilt Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11238
rclitman@gmail.com
cc: Wachtel Missry LLP (Scott D. Woller, Esq.) — for information
Prepared April 10, 2026 | Litman v. Goldberg, Index No. 524343/2025
Cross-references: output/GOULD_HURLEY_EMAIL_CORRESPONDENCE.md; output/DISCOVERY_DEMAND_MISSING_ALLOCATION_REPORTS.md; output/DISCOVERY_DEMAND_JULY_2025_WIRE_RECORDS.md