The order is four words shorter than it could have been. Defendants at law firms accused of betraying their own clients usually win something on a motion to dismiss — a claim trimmed here, a theory struck there. On August 4, Justice Gerald J. Greenan III of Erie County Supreme Court gave Buffalo’s Brown Chiari LLP nothing. The firm’s motion to dismiss was denied in its entirety, and every one of the five causes of action against it — legal malpractice, fraud, civil conspiracy, aiding and abetting a breach of fiduciary duty, and, most seriously, attorney deceit under Judiciary Law § 487 — will now proceed into discovery.
The Ethics Reporter has reviewed the decision and the 35-page amended complaint in MVP Delivery and Logistics, Inc. v. Brown Chiari LLP et al., Erie County Index No. 801929/2026. What they describe, if the allegations are ultimately proven, is one of the more audacious conflict-of-interest schemes to reach a New York courtroom in years: a prominent plaintiffs’ firm accused of taking on a judgment debtor as a client — while simultaneously representing the judgment creditor trying to collect from it — and then quietly dismantling the debtor’s legal claims from the inside.
A Death on a Western New York Road
The story begins on July 7, 2004, when a delivery truck owned by MVP Delivery and Logistics, Inc. — a Depew-based contractor that ran pickup and delivery routes for DHL in Buffalo and Rochester — crossed a double-yellow line with an employee named William Porter at the wheel. The head-on collision killed Claudia D’Agostino Carlson, a wife and mother of three.
Her widower, Michael J. Carlson, retained Brown Chiari to bring a wrongful death action. A jury awarded roughly $20 million against MVP, DHL, and Porter. The Appellate Division later cut DHL loose — finding Porter was on a personal errand, outside the scope of his employment — and reduced the award. By 2009 the judgment against MVP stood at approximately $7.3 million; by 2015, with interest, it had grown to $17,263,289.50.
MVP carried a $1 million policy through Cincinnati Insurance. That was all that ever got paid toward the judgment. The company — which by its own account had been generating $3.5 million a year in revenue with roughly 70 vehicles and 100 workers — shut its doors in February 2009, crushed by a debt it could not finance its way around.
The wreckage produced a decade of satellite litigation over one question: whether additional insurance existed. In April 2006, before trial, DHL had disclosed a National Union Fire Insurance policy that arguably provided MVP additional coverage. According to MVP’s complaint, nobody — not Brown Chiari, representing the Carlson estate, and not Goldberg Segalla, defending MVP — timely pursued it. Carlson (through Brown Chiari) later sued the insurers claiming the coverage had been concealed; MVP (through other counsel) sued Goldberg Segalla for malpractice in 2016 for failing to chase coverage that had been disclosed. Those two positions could not both be true — a contradiction that, MVP now alleges, explains much of what followed.
Two Weeks After the Court of Appeals Ruled, the Phone Rang
In November 2017, the New York Court of Appeals revived the Carlson estate’s coverage claims in Carlson v. American International Group, a significant insurance-law decision. Two weeks later, on December 6, 2017, MVP’s owners, Kevin Grupp and Robert Moll, were summoned to Brown Chiari’s offices on Walden Avenue — contacted directly, the complaint alleges, without the consent of MVP’s then-counsel of record.
There, according to the complaint, name partner James E. Brown told them their current lawyers weren’t serving them well and that Brown Chiari would act in MVP’s best interests. What the firm allegedly never mentioned: it still represented Michael Carlson — the man holding a $17 million judgment against MVP. The complaint alleges there was no conflict disclosure, no waiver, no written consent, no engagement agreement, and no fee arrangement. Ever.
On February 13, 2018, Brown Chiari substituted in as MVP’s counsel in both of its pending lawsuits — the insurance coverage action and the malpractice case against Goldberg Segalla.
Nine days later, the malpractice case was dead.
“This BS Malpractice Case”
On February 22, 2018, a stipulation of discontinuance signed by James Brown was filed, dismissing MVP’s claims against Goldberg Segalla with prejudice — permanently — and, the complaint alleges, “without any consideration paid to MVP” and “unbeknownst to MVP.”
The complaint reconstructs what Brown allegedly told Grupp and Moll, “in sum and substance,” when they were called back to the office: the malpractice case was “a loser, can’t win, there’s nothing there”; Goldberg Segalla’s Dennis Glascott was “a good guy” they didn’t “want to drag through the mud”; the real villains were DHL and National Union, “who hid the policies.” And then the kicker: “The real money for you is in [the insurance action], not this BS malpractice case.”
MVP’s complaint offers two theories for why its own lawyers would kill its claim eight days after taking it over. First, Brown allegedly “maintained a close personal relationship” with Glascott — the very Goldberg Segalla partner who had defended MVP in the underlying trial. Second, and more structurally: MVP’s malpractice theory rested on the premise that the National Union coverage had been disclosed back in 2006 and negligently ignored — by Goldberg Segalla, but also, necessarily, by Brown Chiari itself. As the complaint puts it, if the Carlson coverage litigation faltered, “Brown Chiari faced possible liability for legal malpractice in excess of 20 million dollars.” Discontinuing MVP’s case — with prejudice — made the argument that would have exposed the firm disappear.
Four Quiet Years, Then a “Frantic” Call
What did Brown Chiari do for MVP over the next four years? “Next to nothing,” the complaint alleges — the firm never even obtained MVP’s case files from prior counsel. Meanwhile, starting in late 2021, the firm was quietly mediating the Carlson estate’s coverage claims against DHL and its insurers.
On March 2, 2022, Kevin Grupp allegedly received “a frantic call” from Brown: a settlement in principle had been reached in the Carlson case — and there was a catch. The insurers would pay Carlson nothing unless MVP discontinued its own coverage claims too. The defendants “were unwilling to offer MVP any money,” Brown allegedly reported, but MVP’s discontinuance “was a required condition” of the Carlson settlement.
Brown Chiari’s incentive was not subtle: the firm stood to collect a one-third contingency fee on what the complaint describes as an eight-figure settlement for Carlson. But the fee could not be earned unless MVP — also its client — surrendered.
What happened over the following days, March 3 through 6, 2022, in meetings at Brown Chiari’s offices, forms the heart of the deceit claim. When Grupp balked, the complaint alleges, attorneys Brown, Donald Chiari, and Angelo Gambino threatened that Carlson — through separate personal counsel, sued here as “John Doe” defendants — would “exercise his rights as judgment creditor” and “take over” MVP and all of its claims. They allegedly told MVP its case was about to be dismissed anyway, and falsely claimed the Court of Appeals had “gutted” its claims. They refused to reveal the Carlson settlement amount, citing confidentiality, while demanding MVP’s signature as a condition of it. And they made clear, per the complaint, that the firm “would not be willing to continue to represent MVP” if it refused — leaving the company, on the eve of trial, with no time to find new counsel.
MVP relented, settling its claims for what the complaint calls “nuisance value.” On June 3, 2022, Gambino signed the stipulation discontinuing MVP’s insurance action with prejudice. One final detail stands out in the pleading: Brown Chiari allegedly “offered MVP additional sums if MVP would agree to release them from their own wrongdoing.” MVP declined.
“Not Allegations of Mere Strategic Disagreement”
Brown Chiari, Brown, Chiari, and Gambino moved to dismiss everything, arguing among other things that the pleading amounted to ordinary negligence claims dressed up as fraud, and that prior court rulings had established MVP’s and Carlson’s interests were aligned. Justice Greenan was unpersuaded on every front.
On the Judiciary Law § 487 claim — the attorney-deceit statute that carries treble damages — the court’s language was pointed: “These are not allegations of mere strategic disagreement or negligent misjudgment; if true, they describe knowing, affirmative misrepresentations and concealment undertaken to benefit Defendants and their other client at MVP’s expense.” The court catalogued the alleged deceits: concealing the conflict, falsely assuring MVP that the firm “would act in MVP’s best interests while its true intent was to protect Carlson’s competing recovery,” misrepresenting the merits of the Goldberg Segalla case, and hiding both the discontinuance and the terms of the settlement MVP was pressured to accept.
The malpractice claim survived on allegations that the firm breached its duties of “care and loyalty,” with damages including “the lost value of the discontinued malpractice claim and a diminished settlement of the coverage claims.” The fraud claim survived because the complaint identified “the who, what, when, and how” of specific misrepresentations. The conspiracy and aiding-and-abetting claims — the latter aimed at Carlson’s still-unnamed personal attorneys — survived with them.
MVP, represented by Moses & Singer LLP, seeks more than $5 million in actual damages, $15 million in treble damages under § 487, and punitive damages. The case now proceeds to answers, discovery, and depositions — where the internal files of one of Buffalo’s best-known personal injury firms will be opened to examination.
The Widower
There is a grim coda to the Carlson story, one that public records connect to the same family at the center of this two-decade litigation war. In January 2014, a physician named Dr. Michael J. Carlson struck and killed Meg Menzies, a mother of three who was out on a morning run in Hanover County, Virginia. He was driving drunk. He pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and DUI and was sentenced in 2015 to ten years with six suspended. Contemporaneous reporting by the Richmond Times-Dispatch identified him as a man who “became a widower when his wife was killed in N.Y. a decade ago” — and his sentencing defense cited the loss of his wife in a car crash that left him raising three young children alone.
Two families destroyed by two drivers, ten years apart — and in between, a $17 million judgment that, according to a complaint now sustained by a New York court, became less a vehicle for justice than a fee engine that consumed every party it touched.
What Comes Next
It bears emphasis: a motion to dismiss tests only the sufficiency of allegations, which the court must accept as true at this stage. Nothing has been proven. Brown Chiari and its partners deny wrongdoing and vigorously contested the claims; their counsel argued the suit repackages hindsight disagreement as fraud. Discovery will test whose account holds.
But the questions Justice Greenan’s order sends into discovery are not small ones. How does a firm come to represent a company while holding a $17 million judgment against it for another client — with no engagement letter, no waiver, and no fee agreement in the file? Why does a malpractice claim die eight days after new counsel arrives, with prejudice, for nothing in return? And when the eight-figure settlement finally came, who was Brown Chiari working for?
The Ethics Reporter will continue to follow the case.