Court: Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of Kings Index No.: 524343/2025 Assigned: Hon. Brian L. Gotlieb, J.S.C. Plaintiff: Richard C. Litman (Pro Se) Defendants: Joshua B. Goldberg; Nath, Goldberg & Meyer, PLLC Served upon: Aaron H. Gould, Esq. and Leo J. Hurley, Jr., Esq., Connell Foley LLP, counsel for Defendants Date: April 16, 2026
Pursuant to CPLR §§ 3120, 3122, and 3124 and the Preliminary Conference Order entered in this action, Plaintiff Richard C. Litman hereby serves this Supplemental Demand for Production upon Defendants Joshua B. Goldberg and Nath, Goldberg & Meyer, PLLC ("NGM"). Defendants shall produce the documents described below, in the format specified in Section VIII, within thirty (30) days of the date of service.
The categories below derive directly from an email dated September 3, 2025 from Aaron H. Gould, Esq. of Connell Foley LLP to Plaintiff Richard C. Litman, copying Cherylyn Tanner, Matt Ramin, and Leo J. Hurley, Jr., Esq. (the "Gould 9/3/2025 Email"). In that email, defense counsel expressly acknowledged three live, unresolved issues requiring follow-up after discussion with their clients:
Counsel's promised follow-up responses appear never to have been delivered. Each unkept "back to you" promise is itself a discovery deficiency, independent of the substantive merits of each issue. The categories below seek the documents underlying each of the three issues counsel acknowledged, together with the correspondence record of the promised (but apparently undelivered) follow-up responses.
The demand is material to the surviving § 51 claim because (a) the 2024 accounting is the arithmetic bridge between the produced quarterly reports (Q1 2020 – Q1 2023) and the produced monthly Payment Allocation Reports (Oct 2023 – Jun 2025); (b) the litman@4patent.com mailbox is the express subject of Amendment Section 3 (royalty-free email license) and of Finding No. 106 (approximately 8,024 emails landing in the "eliminated" account post-July 18, 2025); and (c) the very existence of a proposed use agreement is a party admission that Defendants themselves recognized the need for authorization Defendants elsewhere claim was already implicit in the Combination Agreement.
For the period January 1, 2024 through December 31, 2024, Defendants shall produce the complete suite of accounting records that counsel promised to address in the Gould 9/3/2025 Email. The produced October 2023 monthly Payment Allocation by Client Report is the reference exemplar for monthly format; the produced Q1 2023 quarterly report set is the reference exemplar for quarterly format.
Request No. 1 — Monthly Payment Allocation by Client Reports, January through December 2024. Produce each monthly Payment Allocation by Client Report ("PAR") for every month in 2024, in the same form and format as the produced October 2023 PAR, including the per-client fee-credit allocation, the Litman 20% share computation, and the underlying fee-earner breakdown for each month.
Request No. 2 — Trust-account ledgers, January through December 2024. Produce the complete monthly and quarterly trust-account ledgers for every NGM trust, escrow, wire-receipt, or operating bank account in which client funds were received, held, or transferred during 2024, including without limitation Bank of America Escrow account ending 8777, Eagle Bank Trust account ending 0495, Bank of America wire-receipt account ending 8751 (full number 003926278751), Bank of America Operating account ending 2417, Freedom Bank of Virginia account 220001028, and Freedom Bank of Virginia account 220001002.
Request No. 3 — Collections receipts, January through December 2024. Produce every deposit slip, wire confirmation, check image, ACH confirmation, and payment-receipt record for funds received by NGM from any client in 2024, with a sufficient audit trail to tie each receipt to (a) the depositing institutional or individual client, (b) the matter or docket to which the receipt was credited, and (c) the allocation of the receipt to any fee earner, including Plaintiff.
Request No. 4 — Soluno and PCLaw monthly accounting exports for 2024. Produce every system-generated report — including without limitation Fee Allocation, Client WIP, Billing, Collection, Client Ledger, Trust Bank Journal, Client Trust Listing, General Ledger, and Billing Register — generated by NGM's Soluno and PCLaw practice-management systems covering any portion of January 1, 2024 through December 31, 2024, in the report-export format in which they were generated (PDF, Excel, CSV, or native Soluno / PCLaw export) with creation, modification, and author metadata preserved.
Request No. 5 — Litman 2024 Quarterly Summary workbooks. Produce the "Litman 2024 Summary 1QTR," "Litman 2024 Summary 2QTR," "Litman 2024 Summary 3QTR," and "Litman 2024 Summary 4QTR" Goldberg-prepared workbooks, in native .xlsx format with formulas, hidden sheets, comments, tracked changes, and pivot-table source data intact. These are the 2024 analogues of the previously-produced Q4 2020, Q3 2021, Q2 2022, and Q4 2022 Goldberg-prepared "Litman 20XX Summary" workbooks.
Request No. 6 — The response Connell Foley promised but apparently never delivered. Produce every draft, note, internal memorandum, email, or other record of the 2024-accounting response that Connell Foley committed in the Gould 9/3/2025 Email to provide to Plaintiff, including every version, redline, revision, or annotation of any such response, whether sent to Plaintiff or retained internally.
Request No. 7 — Related internal communications. Produce every internal NGM and Connell Foley communication — including email, text, Teams / Slack / chat, memoranda, and meeting notes — in which the 2024 accounting, the form of the response promised in the Gould 9/3/2025 Email, or any reason for non-delivery of such response, was discussed, at any time from August 1, 2025 through the present.
Defense counsel's use of the word "issue" in reference to the litman@4patent.com email domain in the Gould 9/3/2025 Email is itself an admission that a live, unresolved dispute exists concerning the domain and the mailbox. The documents below are the underlying records of that issue.
Request No. 8 — Connell Foley and NGM analyses of the domain issue. Produce every draft, note, memorandum, opinion letter, legal analysis, or other work product prepared by Connell Foley LLP, NGM, or any consultant retained by either, that discusses, analyzes, evaluates, or takes a position concerning the litman@4patent.com domain, the 4patent.com domain more broadly, the litman@4patent.com mailbox, or any Amendment Section 3 or other contractual license to either the domain or the mailbox.
Request No. 9 — Proposed resolutions of the domain issue. Produce every proposed, drafted, circulated, or considered resolution, settlement, side agreement, stipulation, or use arrangement concerning the litman@4patent.com domain or mailbox, in any form whether executed or unexecuted.
Request No. 10 — Internal NGM communications, June 1, 2025 through present. Produce every internal NGM communication — including email, text, Teams / Slack / chat, memoranda, and meeting notes — sent, received, or created at any time from June 1, 2025 through the present, that references, discusses, proposes, or addresses the litman@4patent.com mailbox, the 4patent.com domain, the elimination of Plaintiff's mailbox access, or the disposition of inbound mail directed to that mailbox.
Request No. 11 — Technical records of mailbox access termination. Produce every Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online administrative record — including without limitation the admin audit log, mailbox audit log, role-assignment change log, license-assignment log, and tenant-level change log — reflecting when, why, and by whom access to the litman@4patent.com mailbox was restricted, suspended, reassigned, or otherwise rendered inaccessible to Plaintiff, on or about July 18, 2025 (and at any subsequent time through the present).
Request No. 12 — Disposition of inbound mail, July 18, 2025 forward. Produce the complete inbound mail record for litman@4patent.com from July 18, 2025 through the present, in native format, together with every forwarding rule, transport rule, auto-reply rule, journaling rule, and retention-policy action applied to the mailbox during that period. NGM's own Bates-stamped production already reflects that approximately 8,024 emails continued to land in the litman@4patent.com, r.litman@4patent.com, and rlitman@nathlaw.com mailboxes after July 18, 2025; the complete inbound corpus is demanded.
Request No. 13 — 4patent.com domain-administration records. Produce every registrar, DNS, and DKIM administrative record for the 4patent.com domain from January 1, 2020 through the present, including without limitation the WHOIS history, registrar account statements, renewal invoices, and every change log reflecting DNS, MX, DKIM, SPF, or DMARC modifications.
Request No. 14 — The response Connell Foley promised but apparently never delivered. Produce every draft, note, internal memorandum, email, or other record of the domain-issue response that Connell Foley committed in the Gould 9/3/2025 Email to provide to Plaintiff, including every version, redline, revision, or annotation of any such response, whether sent to Plaintiff or retained internally.
The very act of proposing a new agreement to govern use of Plaintiff's name, as of September 2025, is a party admission that no presently operative authorization covers Defendants' continuing use. The categories below seek the complete drafting, internal-deliberation, and external-consultation record of the proposed use agreement.
Request No. 15 — All drafts of the proposed use agreement. Produce every draft of any agreement Defendants, Connell Foley, or any person acting on either's behalf has prepared, drafted, considered, circulated, negotiated, or proposed concerning use of Plaintiff's name, signature, voice, image, photograph, or likeness, in any form or medium, including without limitation patent prosecution correspondence, trademark prosecution correspondence, the nathlaw.com website, the litmanlaw.com website, NGM marketing materials, social-media posts, LinkedIn postings, client newsletters, client engagement letters, client transmittal emails, filings before the USPTO, and filings before any trademark, patent, or regulatory office. Produce the initial draft through the latest draft, in native format, with version-history metadata and change-tracking intact.
Request No. 16 — Internal communications discussing the scope of the use agreement. Produce every internal NGM and Connell Foley communication — including email, text, Teams / Slack / chat, memoranda, meeting notes, and redlined drafts — in which the substantive scope, purpose, necessity, licensing terms, duration, territory, consideration, or enforceability of any proposed use agreement was discussed, proposed, debated, revised, or rejected.
Request No. 17 — License, license-back, and sublicense drafts. Produce every draft, term sheet, or marked-up provision of any license, license-back, sublicense, authorization, consent, or waiver concerning Plaintiff's name, signature, voice, image, photograph, or likeness, whether free-standing or embedded within a larger draft agreement.
Request No. 18 — Version-history metadata and authorship records. For each draft produced in response to Request Nos. 15 through 17, produce the complete version-history metadata (creation date, modification dates, author, revision identifiers), including the identity of every author, editor, reviewer, and commentator who drafted, edited, commented upon, or approved any portion of any draft.
Request No. 19 — Drafts circulated within NGM. Produce every copy of every draft responsive to Request Nos. 15 through 17 that was circulated, shared, or discussed with any NGM principal, member, employee, or agent, including without limitation Joshua B. Goldberg, Jerald Meyer, Howard W. Kline, Ilirian Durri, Martha Long, Tanya Harkins, and any NGM accounting or administrative personnel.
Request No. 20 — External correspondence concerning the use issue. Produce every communication between NGM, Connell Foley, or any agent of either, and any insurer, professional-responsibility advisor, ethics counsel, malpractice-coverage broker, or third-party consultant, discussing the use of Plaintiff's name, the need for a use agreement, the scope of any proposed use agreement, or any risk, claim, or exposure arising from Defendants' continuing use of Plaintiff's name.
Request No. 21 — Pre-September 2025 predecessors and post-September 2025 successors. Produce every earlier or later iteration of any document that preceded or succeeded the September 2025 proposed use agreement, including any draft prepared in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, or 2026 that addresses any authorization, consent, license, or use arrangement concerning Plaintiff's name, signature, voice, image, photograph, or likeness.
Request No. 22 — The response Connell Foley promised but apparently never delivered. Produce every draft, note, internal memorandum, email, or other record of the use-agreement response that Connell Foley committed in the Gould 9/3/2025 Email to provide to Plaintiff, including every version, redline, revision, or annotation of any such response, whether sent to Plaintiff or retained internally.
Request No. 23 — Post-September 3, 2025 Connell Foley correspondence. Produce every communication — including email, letter, text, telephone-call memorandum, or other record — sent by Connell Foley LLP (or any attorney, paralegal, or agent thereof) to Plaintiff on or after September 3, 2025, that responds or purports to respond to any of the three issues acknowledged in the Gould 9/3/2025 Email (the 2024 accounting, the litman@4patent.com domain issue, and the proposed use agreement).
Request No. 24 — Internal Connell Foley notes on response-drafting. Produce every internal Connell Foley communication, memorandum, draft, or meeting note reflecting the drafting, review, approval, delay, deferral, or abandonment of any follow-up response to the three issues acknowledged in the Gould 9/3/2025 Email.
Request No. 25 — Sworn statement in the absence of responses. If no written follow-up responses to any of the three issues were ever sent by Connell Foley to Plaintiff, Defendants shall provide a sworn statement to that effect, signed by counsel, identifying (a) which of the three issues were never responded to, (b) the date on which counsel determined that no response would be sent, and (c) the reason for non-response.
Request No. 26 — NGM authorization of Connell Foley to propose a use agreement. Produce every communication — including email, text, Teams / Slack / chat, memoranda, meeting notes, and retainer or engagement-letter modification — between Connell Foley and NGM (including Joshua B. Goldberg, Jerald Meyer, Howard W. Kline, or any other NGM principal) authorizing, instructing, or directing Connell Foley to propose, negotiate, or draft a use agreement concerning Plaintiff's name, signature, voice, image, photograph, or likeness.
Request No. 27 — NGM partner-meeting records. Produce every meeting note, memorandum, agenda, minute, calendar invitation, or other record of any NGM partner meeting, management meeting, or principals' call at which the proposed use agreement — or the need for a use agreement — was discussed.
Request No. 28 — Timeline of NGM's use-agreement determination. Produce every document reflecting the date on which NGM first determined that a use agreement was needed, including every internal discussion, memo, or communication predating the Gould 9/3/2025 Email that references the need for, adequacy of, or absence of authorization for Defendants' ongoing use of Plaintiff's name.
"Gould 9/3/2025 Email" means the email dated September 3, 2025 from Aaron H. Gould, Esq. to Plaintiff, copying Cherylyn Tanner, Matt Ramin, and Leo J. Hurley, Jr., Esq., acknowledging the 2024 accounting, the litman@4patent.com email domain issue, and the proposed use agreement as live, unresolved matters requiring follow-up after consultation with Defendants.
"2024 Accounting" means every monthly, quarterly, and annual accounting, reconciliation, fee-allocation, collection-report, trust-account ledger, PCLaw report, Soluno report, Goldberg-prepared summary workbook, and related source document covering any portion of January 1, 2024 through December 31, 2024, whether reflecting collections, fee allocations, payments to Plaintiff, offsets against Plaintiff's 20% share, or any other component of NGM's accounting for work originated by Plaintiff.
"Email Domain Issue" means every aspect of the dispute concerning the 4patent.com domain, the litman@4patent.com mailbox, Plaintiff's access to or license in either the domain or the mailbox, the termination or restriction of such access on or about July 18, 2025, the continuing receipt of inbound mail at the mailbox after that date, and any aspect of the domain's DNS, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, MX, or registrar administration.
"Use Agreement" means any agreement — whether titled "use agreement," "license," "license-back," "sublicense," "consent," "waiver," "authorization," "side letter," "amendment," "memorandum of understanding," or by any other designation — that addresses, governs, authorizes, limits, conditions, or extinguishes Defendants' use of Plaintiff's name, signature, voice, image, photograph, or likeness, in any form or medium, whether executed or unexecuted.
"Draft" means any version, iteration, redline, comment-bearing copy, track-changes copy, revision, annotation, or working copy of any document, including any copy circulated for comment or review, whether or not retained in final form.
"Internal Communication" means any communication — email, text, SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Teams, Slack, other chat platform, memorandum, meeting note, voicemail transcript, or comparable record — sent, received, or created by any NGM member, employee, agent, contractor, or outside service provider acting on NGM's behalf, or by any Connell Foley attorney, paralegal, or agent acting on NGM's behalf.
"Relevant Period" means, unless otherwise specified in a particular request, June 15, 2020 through the present, except that (a) Category 1 is limited to calendar year 2024; (b) the communications requests in Categories 2 and 3 extend from June 1, 2025 through the present; and (c) Request No. 21 extends from January 1, 2020 through the present.
"Document" has the meaning set forth in CPLR § 3120 and includes every electronic record in native format with associated metadata preserved.
"Native Format" means the file format in which the document was originally created, maintained, and stored in the ordinary course of business, with all metadata, hidden text, comments, tracked changes, and embedded attachments intact.
The Gould 9/3/2025 Email is a contemporaneous written record establishing that, as of at least that date, Defendants and their counsel were on notice of all three issues described above. Any subsequent destruction, alteration, purge, overwrite, archive-rotation, or retention-schedule-driven loss of any document, draft, communication, metadata field, or system record related to any of the three issues will be treated as presumptively spoliative and will support a motion for an adverse inference and sanctions under CPLR § 3126.
Defendants and their agents shall immediately suspend any routine deletion, purge, overwrite, archive-rotation, or retention-schedule-driven destruction of any Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online record, admin audit log, mailbox audit log, email, text, chat message, Word draft, Excel workbook, PCLaw or Soluno report, or back-up file relating to the 2024 accounting, the litman@4patent.com domain or mailbox, or the proposed use agreement, from the date of service of this Demand forward.
.msg files and .eml files shall be produced in native format with full header metadata and all attachments intact, linked by load file..xlsx with formulas, hidden sheets, hidden rows and columns, comments, tracked changes, and all pivot-table source data intact.Custodian, Sent Date, Created Date, Last Modified Date, Author, From, To, CC, Subject, Attachment Names, MD5Hash, and File Path shall be populated for every record.Plaintiff is prepared to meet and confer in good faith concerning the scope, phasing, or technical format of this Supplemental Demand before seeking relief from the Court under CPLR § 3124. Plaintiff requests a written response identifying, for each numbered request, whether Defendants (a) will produce, (b) will produce subject to stated objections, or (c) refuse to produce. Any objection must specify the documents being withheld and the basis for the objection with particularity sufficient to permit resolution without judicial intervention.
Defendants' compliance with or refusal of this Supplemental Demand will be assessed in this action against the already-documented pattern of partial production — including, without limitation, the eight-month suppression of the July 2025 Payment Allocation Report (generated August 11, 2025, produced only in April 2026); the non-disclosure of the Freedom Bank of Virginia trust accounts 220001028 and 220001002 on the Schaefer/Kren report of June 26, 2025 while those accounts concurrently appeared on NGM's internal Trust Register Report generated six days later; the misrepresentation that the litman@4patent.com mailbox had been "eliminated" while approximately 8,024 subsequent emails continued to land in that mailbox through at least December 31, 2025; and the continuing absence of any written response to the three issues acknowledged in the Gould 9/3/2025 Email. That pattern — to which any non-production responsive to this Demand will be added — will form the basis for a motion for sanctions under CPLR § 3126 including, without limitation, an adverse inference that the withheld documents, if produced, would have been adverse to Defendants.
Absent a complete response and production within thirty (30) days, Plaintiff will move to compel, for spoliation sanctions, and for such other relief as the Court deems just, including costs and an adverse inference under CPLR § 3126.
Dated: April 16, 2026
Respectfully submitted,
Richard C. Litman Plaintiff, Pro Se [Address] [Telephone] [Email]
Via Email and First-Class Mail
Aaron H. Gould, Esq. Leo J. Hurley, Jr., Esq. Connell Foley LLP [Firm Address]
Re: Litman v. Goldberg, Index No. 524343/2025 (Sup. Ct., Kings Cnty.) — Supplemental Demand for Production of Documents Underlying Defense Counsel's September 3, 2025 Admissions
Dear Mr. Gould and Mr. Hurley:
Enclosed please find Plaintiff's Supplemental Demand for Production, served today pursuant to CPLR §§ 3120, 3122, and 3124. The Demand is drawn directly from your email to me of September 3, 2025, which identified three live, unresolved issues requiring follow-up: the 2024 accounting, the litman@4patent.com email domain issue, and the proposed use agreement. In that email your firm committed to "be back to" me after discussion with your clients. No written response on any of the three issues appears to have been sent in the seven months since.
Each unkept follow-up promise is itself a discovery deficiency. The categories below seek the underlying documents for each of the three acknowledged issues, the Connell Foley work product reflecting the promised response, and the internal NGM authorization for the use-agreement negotiations.
I am available to meet and confer on scope, phasing, or technical format before any motion practice. Please advise by [date + 14 days] whether Defendants will produce within the thirty-day period or whether a conference is necessary.
Very truly yours,
Richard C. Litman Pro Se