SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK COUNTY OF KINGS
------------------------------------------------------------x RICHARD C. LITMAN,
Plaintiff,
-against- Index No. 524343/2025
JOSHUA B. GOLDBERG, NATH, GOLDBERG & MEYER, and NATH & ASSOCIATES PLLC, Hon. Brian L. Gotlieb, J.S.C.
Defendants.
------------------------------------------------------------x
PLAINTIFF'S SECOND SUPPLEMENTAL DEMAND FOR PRODUCTION OF DOCUMENTS AND INTERROGATORIES DIRECTED TO THE AUGUST 2025 AND SEPTEMBER 2025 PAYMENT ALLOCATION REPORTS AND ALL CONCEALED MONTHLY ACCOUNTINGS THROUGH THE PRESENT
TO: Aaron Gould, Esq. CONNELL FOLEY LLP Attorneys for Defendants
PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that, pursuant to CPLR Article 31 and §§ 3120 and 3130, plaintiff Richard C. Litman ("Plaintiff" or "Litman"), by and through his attorneys, hereby demands that defendants Joshua B. Goldberg, Nath, Goldberg & Meyer, and Nath & Associates PLLC (collectively, "Defendants" or "NGM") produce the documents and respond to the interrogatories set forth below within thirty (30) days of service hereof, at the offices of plaintiff's counsel or by electronic transmission acceptable to plaintiff's counsel.
This demand is supplemental to plaintiff's First Supplemental Demand of April 6, 2026 (directed to the July-September 2023 reporting gap) and is made necessary by a material change in the evidentiary record that occurred on April 7, 2026: the recovery of the July 2025 Payment Allocation by Client Report, a document Defendants generated in the ordinary course of business on August 11, 2025, retained continuously in their possession, and withheld from Plaintiff for nearly eight months. The recovery of the July 2025 Report eliminates any factual basis for the prior assumption that the post-litigation-threat reporting cadence had been disrupted, suspended, or destroyed. The cadence continued. The reports were generated. They were concealed. This demand seeks the August 2025, September 2025, and subsequent monthly Reports that, on the same now-established cadence, must likewise exist.
"NGM" means Nath, Goldberg & Meyer, Nath & Associates PLLC, and any predecessor, successor, affiliate, parent, subsidiary, or d/b/a entity, and any of its members, partners, employees, agents, or attorneys.
"Goldberg" means defendant Joshua B. Goldberg, individually and in any capacity in which he acted or purported to act on behalf of NGM.
"Litman" or "Plaintiff" means Richard C. Litman.
"Payment Allocation Report" or "Report" means any document — in PDF, Excel, Word, hand-written, electronic, or any other form — bearing the title or substantive content of a "Payment Allocation by Client Report," "Payment Allocation by Client Report for RCL as originating attorney," "Firm-Wide Payment Allocation Report," or any similarly captioned periodic accounting that purports to reflect funds collected, fees earned, costs disbursed, fee-credit lawyer allocations, or amounts owed to Richard C. Litman as originating attorney, including all preliminary, draft, final, superseded, revised, "updated," or "_1" versions thereof.
"Litman-Originated Matter" means any matter, docket, file, client engagement, or sub-matter coded internally to NGM Attorney Number 418, or otherwise originated by, brought in by, transitioned from, or attributable in whole or in part to Richard C. Litman, including but not limited to matters for King Saud University (KSU), King Faisal University (KFU), Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC), Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR), Kuwait University, United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), Dasman Diabetes Institute, Sabah Al Ahmad Center, MSI STEM Research & Development Consortium (MSRDC), Pigeonly Inc., and any client whose docket number begins with "1," "J," or "5" or which has at any time been associated with Customer Number 37833 at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
"Recovered July 2025 Report" means the Payment Allocation by Client Report dated 8/11/2025, covering the period July 1-31, 2025, produced to Plaintiff on or about April 7, 2026, reflecting a total of $66,335.23 ($31,958.55 in fees, $33,851.68 in hard costs, $525.00 in soft costs), with 100% responsible/collecting lawyer credit to Richard C. Litman and a fee-credit allocation to Litman of $40,768.39.
"Concealment Period" means the period from August 1, 2025 through the date of Defendants' response to this demand, during which Defendants generated monthly Payment Allocation Reports in the ordinary course of business and failed to provide them to Plaintiff.
"PCLaw" means the PCLaw practice management and billing system used by NGM at any time relevant to this action.
"Soluno" means the Soluno cloud accounting and billing platform used by NGM at any time relevant to this action, including any data migration into or out of PCLaw.
"Communication" means any transmission of information of any kind, by any means, including without limitation email, text message, instant message, Slack, Teams, voicemail, letter, memorandum, note, or any other oral or written exchange, and includes attachments, drafts, and metadata.
"Document" is used in its broadest sense under CPLR § 3101 and includes electronically stored information ("ESI") in native format with all metadata intact.
Instructions.
a. These demands are continuing in nature. If responsive material is generated, located, or comes into Defendants' possession, custody, or control after service of any response, Defendants must supplement under CPLR § 3101(h).
b. ESI shall be produced in its native format with all metadata preserved. Spreadsheets shall be produced as native .xlsx files with all formulas, tabs, and hidden columns intact. PDF Reports shall be produced with all embedded metadata, including creation date, modification date, and author fields, intact.
c. If any document is withheld on a claim of privilege, produce a privilege log compliant with CPLR § 3122(b) and Uniform Rule 202.20-c.
d. If any responsive document has been lost, destroyed, deleted, or otherwise rendered inaccessible, identify the document, the date and circumstances of its loss, and the person responsible.
Until April 7, 2026, Plaintiff's working assumption — reflected in his prior pleadings, discovery papers, and the contemporaneous litigation memorandum captioned "Litigation Memo: The July-September 2025 Payment Data Gap" — was that the monthly Payment Allocation Reports for July, August, and September 2025 had been destroyed, never generated, or otherwise rendered inaccessible as a consequence of the elimination of Plaintiff's NGM and 4patent.com email accounts on July 18, 2025 (one day after Plaintiff's explicit litigation threat). On that assumption, Plaintiff's intended remedy was an adverse-inference instruction under VOOM HD Holdings LLC v. EchoStar Satellite L.L.C., 93 A.D.3d 33 (1st Dep't 2012), and Pegasus Aviation I, Inc. v. Varig Logistica S.A., 26 N.Y.3d 543 (2015).
On or about April 7, 2026, the Recovered July 2025 Report was produced to Plaintiff. Its existence and metadata establish, beyond inference or argument, the following facts:
The report was generated. On August 11, 2025 — twenty-four (24) days after the elimination of Plaintiff's email accounts — NGM personnel ran, exported, and saved a Payment Allocation by Client Report for the July 2025 reporting period in the same format used for the prior twenty-one (21) months (October 2023 through June 2025).
The PCLaw/Soluno system was fully operational. The billing and reporting infrastructure functioned normally. No data was destroyed, no server was offline, no system migration disrupted the cadence.
The figures reported by Defendants' counsel match the underlying source. The $31,958.55 fee figure produced in summary form by Aaron Gould in January 2026 corresponds exactly to the fee figure on the Recovered July 2025 Report. Defendants' counsel was, at minimum, drawing on records that were simultaneously being concealed from Plaintiff.
The report was held without disclosure for nearly eight months. From August 11, 2025 through April 7, 2026 — a period of approximately 239 days — the Recovered July 2025 Report sat in NGM's possession while Plaintiff was repeatedly told, in substance, that no such monthly reports were available for the post-July-18 period.
The cadence necessarily continued. Twenty-one consecutive months of timely monthly reports (Oct 2023 - June 2025), followed by a twenty-second timely monthly report (July 2025, generated August 11, 2025), establishes a documented, regular, ordinary-course business practice. There is no evidentiary basis to believe that the cadence broke after August 11, 2025; the only basis to believe so is the absence of production, which is itself the subject of this demand.
The recovery of the July 2025 Report transforms the legal theory and obviates the need for inferential proof:
Spoliation requires inference. The fact-finder must infer that documents existed, that they were relevant, and that they would have helped the moving party. VOOM, 93 A.D.3d at 41-43.
Concealment is direct. The Recovered July 2025 Report is in hand. Its existence is documented by metadata. Its withholding is documented by the eight-month delivery gap. No inference is required for July 2025, and no inference should be required for the months that, on the same monthly cadence, presumptively followed.
The August 2025 Report would have been generated on or about September 11, 2025 — applying the same eleven-day post-month-end interval that produced the July 2025 Report on August 11. The September 2025 Report would have been generated on or about October 11, 2025. By the same logic the October, November, and December 2025 Reports were generated on or about November 11, December 11, and January 11, 2026, respectively, and the January, February, and March 2026 Reports on or about February 11, March 11, and April 11, 2026. None has been produced. Each is presumptively in NGM's possession by the same evidence — ordinary-course generation on a documented monthly cadence — that proved the July 2025 Report's existence.
If the July 2025 Report was generated August 11, 2025 and not produced until April 7, 2026 — a delay of 239 days — then the August 2025 Report (presumptively generated September 11, 2025) is, as of the date of this demand, already 209 days overdue on the same eight-month delivery curve, and counting. Defendants cannot rely on the same delay to justify continued nondisclosure: the very existence of the eight-month delay for July 2025 establishes the wrongful conduct that this demand seeks to halt.
This demand is not a fishing expedition. The cadence is undisputed. The reports are generated by software, on schedule, by named personnel (historically MaryJane Harper), in a format that has been produced twenty-two times before. The only question is when Defendants will turn over the documents they have been holding.
Demand No. 1. The complete August 2025 Payment Allocation by Client Report for Richard C. Litman as originating attorney, in the same format and detail as the Recovered July 2025 Report, including any draft, preliminary, final, superseded, revised, "updated," or "_1" version, in native PDF format with all metadata intact (creation date, modification date, author, software version).
Demand No. 2. The complete September 2025 Payment Allocation by Client Report for Richard C. Litman as originating attorney, in the same format and detail as the Recovered July 2025 Report, including any draft, preliminary, final, superseded, revised, "updated," or "_1" version, in native PDF format with all metadata intact.
Demand No. 3. The complete October 2025 Payment Allocation by Client Report for Richard C. Litman as originating attorney, in the same format and with all versions and metadata as set forth above.
Demand No. 4. The complete November 2025 Payment Allocation by Client Report for Richard C. Litman as originating attorney, in the same format and with all versions and metadata as set forth above.
Demand No. 5. The complete December 2025 Payment Allocation by Client Report for Richard C. Litman as originating attorney, in the same format and with all versions and metadata as set forth above.
Demand No. 6. The complete January 2026 Payment Allocation by Client Report for Richard C. Litman as originating attorney, in the same format and with all versions and metadata as set forth above.
Demand No. 7. The complete February 2026 Payment Allocation by Client Report for Richard C. Litman as originating attorney, in the same format and with all versions and metadata as set forth above.
Demand No. 8. The complete March 2026 Payment Allocation by Client Report for Richard C. Litman as originating attorney, in the same format and with all versions and metadata as set forth above, together with any partial-month or interim Report covering any portion of April 2026 through the date of Defendants' response.
Demand No. 9. Any Firm-Wide Payment Allocation Report or comparable cross-attorney accounting generated by NGM for any month from August 2025 through the date of Defendants' response.
Demand No. 10. All wire transfer records, ACH transaction logs, check registers, and bank statements for every NGM operating and trust account for the period August 1, 2025 through December 31, 2025, showing all incoming receipts on Litman-Originated Matters and all outgoing payments to Richard C. Litman or for his benefit, including the date, amount, source or destination, transaction reference, and any associated narrative or memo field.
Demand No. 11. All wire transfer records, ACH transaction logs, check registers, and bank statements for every NGM operating and trust account for the period January 1, 2026 through the date of Defendants' response, showing the same categories of information.
Demand No. 12. All internal communications — emails, text messages, instant messages, Teams or Slack messages, memoranda, notes, calendar entries, or any other form — among Joshua Goldberg, Lina Schweiss, Martha Long, MaryJane Harper, Cara Van Giezen, Howard Kline, Ilirian Durri, Heba Carter, any other NGM partner, member, employee, agent, bookkeeper, accountant, or attorney, concerning the preparation, generation, content, delivery, withholding, suppression, or non-production of the August 2025 Payment Allocation Report, including any communication discussing whether, when, or to whom the Report should or should not be provided.
Demand No. 13. All internal communications of the categories described in Demand No. 12, concerning the preparation, generation, content, delivery, withholding, suppression, or non-production of the September 2025 Payment Allocation Report.
Demand No. 14. All internal communications of the categories described in Demand No. 12, concerning the preparation, generation, content, delivery, withholding, suppression, or non-production of any Payment Allocation Report for any month from October 2025 through the date of Defendants' response.
Demand No. 15. All communications between any NGM personnel (including Joshua Goldberg, Heba Carter, and any other in-house or outside counsel) and Richard C. Litman, his counsel, his accountant, or any person acting on his behalf, in which any monthly Payment Allocation Report, periodic accounting, fee allocation, or 20% share for any month from July 2025 through the date of Defendants' response was offered, refused, withheld, requested, declined, deferred, or otherwise discussed.
Demand No. 16. All communications between Joshua Goldberg, any other NGM personnel, or Connell Foley LLP (including but not limited to Aaron Gould) on the one hand, and any third party (including any accountant, certified public accountant, bookkeeper, partner, member, lender, insurer, auditor, expert, or successor counsel) on the other hand, in which any August 2025 or September 2025 Payment Allocation Report — or any monthly Report for any month from October 2025 through the date of Defendants' response — was transmitted, summarized, described, or otherwise disclosed.
Demand No. 17. The complete PCLaw and/or Soluno system-generated audit trail or report-generation log reflecting every instance, from August 1, 2025 through the date of Defendants' response, in which a "Payment Allocation by Client Report" (or any similarly captioned periodic accounting) was run, generated, exported, printed, saved, emailed, copied, or otherwise output, including the date and time of generation, the user who generated it, the parameters and filters applied, the file name and storage path of the output, and the destination of any subsequent transmission.
Demand No. 18. All "_1," "updated," "revised," "final," or otherwise duplicated versions of any Payment Allocation Report for any month from July 2025 through the date of Defendants' response, including the original and the revised version, any redline or comparison document, all communications discussing or authorizing the revision, and any audit trail generated by PCLaw, Soluno, Excel, Adobe Acrobat, or any other software in connection with the revision.
Demand No. 19. Any document, instruction, policy, memorandum, note, or communication memorializing a decision, instruction, or directive — whether issued by Joshua Goldberg, NGM management, Heba Carter, Connell Foley LLP, or any other person — that monthly Payment Allocation Reports should not be sent to, made available to, or disclosed to Richard C. Litman after July 18, 2025.
Demand No. 20. The complete client-by-client breakdown that underlies any Payment Allocation Report for August 2025, September 2025, October 2025, November 2025, December 2025, January 2026, February 2026, and March 2026, identifying for each Litman-Originated Matter the client name, docket or matter number, payment date(s), payment amount(s), trust vs. operating treatment, fees collected, hard and soft cost disbursements, the fee-credit lawyer allocation to Richard C. Litman, and the resulting twenty-percent (20%) allocation to Richard C. Litman.
Demand No. 21. All trust account statements, sub-account ledgers, and trust ledger reports maintained by NGM for any Litman-Originated Matter for the period August 1, 2025 through the date of Defendants' response.
Demand No. 22. All operating account statements for NGM for the period August 1, 2025 through the date of Defendants' response, showing all deposits from trust transfers and the source matter for each.
Demand No. 23. Any document that describes, memorializes, or reflects any change in the cadence, format, distribution, or recipients of monthly Payment Allocation Reports occurring at any time after July 1, 2025, including any instruction to remove Richard C. Litman from any distribution list.
Pursuant to CPLR § 3130, Defendants are directed to answer each of the following interrogatories under oath, separately and fully, within thirty (30) days of service.
Interrogatory No. 1. State whether a Payment Allocation by Client Report was generated, drafted, prepared, exported, or saved (whether or not delivered to Plaintiff) for the month of August 2025. If yes, identify (a) the date and time of generation; (b) the person who generated it; (c) the software used; (d) the file name and storage location; (e) every person to whom it was transmitted, shown, summarized, or otherwise disclosed; and (f) the reason it was not delivered to Plaintiff.
Interrogatory No. 2. State whether a Payment Allocation by Client Report was generated, drafted, prepared, exported, or saved (whether or not delivered to Plaintiff) for the month of September 2025, and provide the same information set forth in Interrogatory No. 1(a)–(f).
Interrogatory No. 3. For each month from October 2025 through the most recent completed calendar month preceding the date of Defendants' response, state whether a Payment Allocation by Client Report was generated for that month, and if so provide the same information set forth in Interrogatory No. 1(a)–(f).
Interrogatory No. 4. Identify by name, title, employment status, and last known address every person who participated in the preparation, generation, review, approval, distribution decision, or non-distribution decision concerning any Payment Allocation Report for any month from July 2025 through the date of Defendants' response.
Interrogatory No. 5. State whether any person — including Joshua Goldberg, Heba Carter, any partner or member of NGM, any in-house or outside counsel, or any third party — ever instructed, directed, advised, or requested that monthly Payment Allocation Reports for periods after July 1, 2025 be withheld from, not delivered to, or not disclosed to Richard C. Litman or his representatives. If yes, identify the person who gave the instruction, the person to whom it was given, the date, the form (oral or written), and the substance of the instruction.
Interrogatory No. 6. Explain in full the reason that the Recovered July 2025 Report — generated on August 11, 2025 — was not delivered, transmitted, or otherwise made available to Plaintiff or his counsel until on or about April 7, 2026, a period of approximately 239 days.
Interrogatory No. 7. Identify every person, entity, or organization (including any certified public accountant, bookkeeper, accountant, lender, insurer, auditor, expert, partner, or successor counsel) to whom any Payment Allocation Report for any month from July 2025 through the date of Defendants' response was transmitted, summarized, or otherwise disclosed, and for each such transmission state the date, the recipient, the medium, and the purpose.
Interrogatory No. 8. State whether the cadence, format, software, personnel, distribution list, or any other operational aspect of NGM's monthly Payment Allocation reporting process changed at any time after July 1, 2025. If yes, describe each change, the date of the change, the person who authorized it, and the reason for it.
Interrogatory No. 9. Identify every billing, accounting, document management, or practice-management software system used by NGM at any time during the period August 1, 2025 through the date of Defendants' response, and state for each system whether the system was used to generate, store, or transmit any Payment Allocation Report.
Interrogatory No. 10. Identify and describe every document — whether or not produced in response to the document demands above — known to Defendants or their counsel that bears upon the existence, preparation, content, transmission, withholding, or non-production of any Payment Allocation Report for any month from July 2025 through the date of Defendants' response.
Interrogatory No. 11. State the present location, custodian, and preservation status of every responsive document identified in your answers to Interrogatories Nos. 1 through 10, and identify any such document that has been lost, destroyed, deleted, overwritten, or otherwise rendered inaccessible.
Defendants are reminded of their continuing obligation under VOOM HD Holdings LLC v. EchoStar Satellite L.L.C., 93 A.D.3d 33 (1st Dep't 2012), and Pegasus Aviation I, Inc. v. Varig Logistica S.A., 26 N.Y.3d 543 (2015), to preserve all evidence — including ESI, billing system data, backup tapes, email mailboxes, cloud storage, removable media, and the PCLaw and Soluno production databases and audit logs — relevant to the matters set forth in this demand and in the underlying litigation.
The duty to preserve in this matter is heightened by the now-documented pattern of active concealment. The Recovered July 2025 Report establishes that Defendants generated a responsive document in the ordinary course of business and withheld it from Plaintiff for approximately 239 days. The same conduct, applied to the August 2025 and September 2025 Reports and to every monthly Report thereafter, would constitute the same wrong each month. Defendants are on direct notice that:
The duty to preserve extends without limitation to: (a) all PCLaw and Soluno data, audit logs, and backups for the period July 1, 2025 through the date of Defendants' response; (b) every version (original, "_1," "updated," "revised," draft, final) of every Payment Allocation Report for every month in that period; (c) the email mailboxes, OneDrive accounts, SharePoint repositories, and local workstations of Joshua Goldberg, Lina Schweiss, Martha Long, MaryJane Harper, Cara Van Giezen, Heba Carter, Ilirian Durri, Howard Kline, and any other NGM personnel involved in billing or reporting; (d) all wire, ACH, check, and bank statement records for the same period; and (e) the previously-eliminated mailboxes of litman@4patent.com and rlitman@nathlaw.com, which remain the subject of Plaintiff's separate spoliation analysis.
Plaintiff demands that Defendants produce all documents responsive to the foregoing demands, and serve sworn answers to the foregoing interrogatories, within thirty (30) days of service hereof. Production shall be made to the offices of Plaintiff's counsel or by secure electronic transmission. ESI shall be produced in native format with metadata preserved.
Plaintiff respectfully notes, for the record, that this demand is not a fishing expedition. The existence of NGM's monthly Payment Allocation reporting cadence is no longer a matter of inference, presumption, or argument. Twenty-two consecutive monthly Reports have been documented (October 2023 through July 2025), the most recent of which was generated by Defendants on August 11, 2025 — twenty-four days after the elimination of Plaintiff's email accounts and after the litigation threat that triggered this lawsuit. The August 2025 Report was, on the same documented cadence, generated on or about September 11, 2025. The September 2025 Report was generated on or about October 11, 2025. Every subsequent monthly Report through the date of this demand was generated on the same schedule. Defendants are in possession of each. They have produced none.
Plaintiff reserves the right to serve additional or supplemental discovery as warranted by Defendants' responses, to move to compel under CPLR § 3124, and to seek sanctions under CPLR § 3126, including monetary sanctions, issue preclusion, and an instruction to the trier of fact reflecting the active concealment of monthly accounting records that Defendants generated in the ordinary course of business and refused to deliver.
Dated: Brooklyn, New York April ___, 2026
Respectfully submitted,
____________________________________
[Counsel for Plaintiff]
Attorneys for Plaintiff
Richard C. Litman
TO: Aaron Gould, Esq. CONNELL FOLEY LLP Attorneys for Defendants Joshua B. Goldberg, Nath, Goldberg & Meyer, and Nath & Associates PLLC
Prepared April 7, 2026 in support of Litman v. Goldberg, Index No. 524343/2025. Cross-references: output/JUL_SEP_2025_PAYMENT_GAP_MEMO.md (Section X — July 2025 recovery); output/MONTHLY_ALLOCATION_REPORTS_AUDIT_JUL2023_JUN2025.md; output/DISCOVERY_DEMAND_MISSING_ALLOCATION_REPORTS.md (First Supplemental Demand, July-September 2023 gap).