A sitting Chief Counsel of one of New York's most powerful attorney disciplinary bodies has no meaningful experience running a grievance operation, does not command the respect of the attorneys and staff who work under him, and is actively attempting to reshape the office in ways that practitioners in the Ninth Judicial District describe as troubling. According to sources with direct knowledge of internal operations at the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District, these concerns have been expressed — in confidence — by Antonia Cipollone, a veteran staff attorney who has served the committee for over two decades.
His name is Courtny Osterling. He holds the title of Chief Counsel. And the central question this publication is asking today is one that the legal community of Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam, and Dutchess counties deserves answered: How did he get there?
And the second question — the one that may be more important — is this: Why is Susan G. Yellen still the Chair of the Committee that Osterling nominally leads?
We reported on Yellen's profound conflict of interest in January 2026. We published a formal complaint against her in March 2026. We documented in exhaustive detail how her law partner, Amy M. Eisenberg, was intimately entangled in the Eisenpress judicial misconduct scandal that shook the Ninth Judicial District to its foundations. Justice Sherri L. Eisenpress resigned from the bench in January 2026 with her retirement effective April 28, 2026 — a direct consequence of formal charges filed by the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct.
Yellen is still Chair. Osterling is still Chief Counsel. And Antonia Cipollone — the most experienced attorney on staff, the institutional memory of the office, a 30-year attorney who has served the public through multiple administrations — appears to have told her concerns to the wrong ears instead of the right ones.
That ends today.
I. Who Is Courtny Osterling?
The public record on Courtny John Osterling is thin — conspicuously, almost defiantly thin for a person who now holds one of the most consequential legal appointments in the Hudson Valley.
According to the New York State Office of Court Administration attorney registration database, Osterling was admitted to the New York bar in 2011. He graduated from Syracuse University College of Law. His registered address is 399 Knollwood Road, Suite 200, White Plains, New York — the address of the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District, Appellate Division, Second Department.
His registration history tells a revealing story. Prior to his current position, Osterling's registration shows him employed at OCA — the Office of Court Administration — at two successive Brooklyn addresses: 330 Jay Street and 1 Pierrepont Plaza. He was registered there from approximately 2020 through 2022. Before that, his professional footprint is effectively invisible in the public record.
Let that sink in. The Chief Counsel of the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District — the office responsible for investigating attorney misconduct across five counties covering hundreds of thousands of legal matters annually — was, as recently as 2022, an OCA administrative attorney in Brooklyn. He is currently only about 14 years out of law school.
His predecessor in the role — if one measures the position informally, as most practitioners in the Ninth District do — was Gary L. Casella, who served as Chief Attorney of the NYS Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District for decades. Casella was a known quantity in the legal community of the Hudson Valley. He had been counsel of record in hundreds of published disciplinary proceedings. He knew the practitioners. He knew the cases. He knew the history. His name appears in Appellate Division decisions going back decades alongside attorneys like Antonia Cipollone, who worked under him as staff counsel.
Osterling replaced that institutional legacy. The question is: why him, and on whose recommendation?
The answer to that question — who sponsored Courtny Osterling's elevation to Chief Counsel — is one that neither the Appellate Division, Second Department, nor the Office of Court Administration has seen fit to explain publicly. There was no announcement. There was no press release. There was no formal vetting process visible to the public. He simply appeared — as OCA employees sometimes do — in a position of extraordinary authority over the professional lives of New York's attorneys.
II. What the Insiders Are Saying
Sources with direct knowledge of internal operations at the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District have told The Ethics Reporter that Antonia Pia Cipollone, staff counsel to the committee, has expressed — in confidence, to grievance defense lawyers who have direct contact with the office — that Osterling has no experience running a disciplinary office and does not command the respect of the attorneys and staff who work around him. She has further indicated that he is attempting to change things in the office in ways that she regards as harmful to its proper functioning.
These are not the whispered complaints of a disgruntled bureaucrat. These are the assessments of a 30-year attorney — admitted to the New York bar in 1995, a graduate of Pace University School of Law — who has worked at the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District for over twenty years. Antonia Cipollone has appeared as counsel in published Appellate Division disciplinary proceedings alongside Gary Casella and later alongside Osterling himself. She appears in the FindLaw attorney directory as a staff member of the committee. She is the institutional continuity of this office. She has seen chiefs come and go.
When she says Osterling lacks experience and does not command respect, she is not speaking from ignorance. She is speaking from two decades of watching how this office is supposed to work.
And yet — and this is where The Ethics Reporter must press a harder question — she has reportedly shared these concerns in confidence with defense lawyers, not with the public.
That is a problem. And it is a problem Cipollone needs to reckon with.
III. The Question of Public Duty
Antonia Cipollone is not a private employee. She is not a staff attorney at a law firm beholden to a managing partner. She is not a corporate counsel who owes confidentiality to a client organization. She is a public servant — paid by the taxpayers of the State of New York — employed by an institution whose entire reason for existence is to serve the public interest.
The Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District exists for one purpose: to protect the public from attorney misconduct. That is its statutory mandate. That is why it is funded. That is why it has subpoena power, investigative authority, and the capacity to end an attorney's career. The public entrusts this body with extraordinary power precisely because the public interest in attorney accountability is so fundamental.
When a senior staff attorney at that committee has genuine concerns — documented, experienced, professionally-grounded concerns — about the competence and direction of the person leading the office, she does not discharge her public duty by whispering those concerns into the ears of defense lawyers over coffee. She does not satisfy her obligation to the people of New York by confiding in the very attorneys who appear on the other side of her cases.
Antonia Cipollone appears to be operating under a fundamental misconception: that she works for Courtny Osterling. She does not. She works for the people of the State of New York. Osterling's name may appear above hers on an organizational chart. But on the chain of accountability that actually matters — the chain that runs from public servants to the public they serve — Osterling is not her boss in any meaningful constitutional or ethical sense. Her obligation runs to the public, not to a Chief Counsel she privately believes is unqualified.
If Antonia Cipollone believes that Courtny Osterling lacks the experience to lead this office — and according to multiple sources, she does believe exactly that — then her obligation is clear: she must say so through appropriate channels. The Appellate Division, Second Department, which supervises the Grievance Committee, has oversight authority. The Office of Court Administration has administrative authority over the committee's staff. The New York State Legislature has oversight authority over the courts. And the press — a free press, functioning as the people's surrogate — is a constitutionally protected avenue for the disclosure of information that the public has a right to know.
Instead, it appears she has confided in defense lawyers — the very practitioners who appear before the committee as respondents' counsel — while continuing to function within an office she privately believes is being mismanaged. That is not loyalty to the public. That is loyalty to institutional self-preservation. And it is precisely the kind of loyalty that produces the structural dysfunction we described in our recent investigation into the constitutional failures of New York's grievance system.
We are not attacking Antonia Cipollone. We are asking her — publicly, directly — to acknowledge what she apparently already knows, and to act on it through channels that actually serve the public interest.
IV. The Yellen Problem That Osterling Won't Solve
The Ethics Reporter has been reporting on Susan G. Yellen since January 2026. Our first investigation, "New York Grievance Committee Chair Susan G. Yellen Must Be Investigated," documented the fundamental conflict of interest at the heart of her chairmanship: she is the law partner of Amy M. Eisenberg, the attorney whose conduct in the Eisenpress judicial misconduct scandal placed a profound question mark over the integrity of the committee she chairs.
Our February 2026 investigation — "The Fox Guarding the Henhouse: How Susan Yellen's Law Partner Amy Eisenberg Helped a Corrupt Judge Escape Accountability" — detailed how Eisenberg was identified as part of the social circle of matrimonial attorneys who maintained improper relationships with Justice Sherri Eisenpress. Those relationships — described in formal judicial conduct charges as including joint vacations to the Dominican Republic and Mexico, a group text chain containing gossip, off-color jokes, and sexually graphic images, and the systematic exchange of judicial confidences — were the basis on which Eisenpress was formally charged and ultimately forced to resign.
Justice Eisenpress submitted a resignation stipulation on January 28, 2026. The Commission on Judicial Conduct accepted it on January 29. Her retirement became effective April 28, 2026.
In March 2026, we published a formal complaint against both Susan G. Yellen (License No. 2435725) and Amy M. Eisenberg, detailing specific allegations of professional misconduct arising from Eisenberg's conduct in the Eisenpress orbit and Yellen's continued service as Chair despite her law partner's direct implication in the scandal.
And as of the most recently revised official court document — the members list for the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District, revised October 2, 2025 — Susan G. Yellen remains Chair.
She has not been removed. She has not resigned. She has not recused herself from the committee's operations in any manner that is visible to the public or to the defense bar. She continues to chair the very body that is supposed to be the conscience of the legal profession in the Ninth Judicial District.
Now ask yourself: where is Courtny Osterling in all of this?
As Chief Counsel, Osterling is the senior staff officer of the Grievance Committee. He is the professional face of the institution. He manages the committee's staff attorneys. He signs the petitions in disciplinary proceedings. He is the person whose name appears on filings before the Appellate Division. And yet, by every available indication, he has done nothing to address the most glaring conflict of interest sitting at the top of the committee he nominally serves.
There are only two explanations for this. Either Osterling lacks the experience, the institutional authority, or the professional courage to confront a situation that even a first-year associate would recognize as ethically untenable. Or he has made a deliberate calculation that removing or confronting Yellen is not worth the political cost. Neither explanation reflects well on a person who holds one of the most important accountability offices in the region.
If he lacks the experience to handle it — as sources suggest — then the appointment was a mistake that must be corrected. If he has the experience and is choosing inaction, then the inaction is its own form of misconduct.
V. The Experience Gap: What It Actually Means
It is worth pausing to explain why experience matters so much in the role of Chief Counsel of a grievance committee — because it is not an abstract concern.
The Chief Counsel of a state grievance committee is not an administrator. This is not a position that can be learned on the job in the usual sense. The Chief Counsel must make real-time decisions about whether to investigate complaints, whether to escalate investigations to formal charges, what sanctions to seek in Appellate Division proceedings, and how to manage the committee's relationships with the Appellate Division judges who ultimately decide every disciplinary case. These decisions have life-altering consequences for the attorneys who are their subjects. A wrongly initiated investigation destroys careers. A failure to investigate protects misconduct. The calibration required — between aggression and restraint, between public protection and due process — is genuinely difficult and genuinely consequential.
It is also a position that requires credibility with the defense bar. Grievance defense lawyers are, by definition, experienced practitioners. Many of them are former prosecutors, former judges, and former disciplinary committee members themselves. They know when they are dealing with someone who commands the room and when they are dealing with someone who does not. They negotiate. They file motions. They appear at hearings. They cross-examine witnesses. The Chief Counsel who cannot command their respect — which, according to our sources, describes Osterling — is at a structural disadvantage in every contested matter.
Antonia Cipollone has been dealing with these defense lawyers for twenty years. She knows their tactics. She knows their cases. She knows the institutional history of the committee — which cases were won, which were lost, which were settled, and why. She is, by any objective professional measure, more qualified to lead this office than the person who currently leads it.
The question of why she does not — and why Osterling does — is not answered by anything in the public record. It demands an answer from the Appellate Division, Second Department, which made or approved this appointment. And it demands an answer from the Office of Court Administration, which employs both of them.
VI. The Appointment Process: A Black Box
How does someone become Chief Counsel of a New York state grievance committee? The answer is: not transparently.
The Chief Counsel of a grievance committee is not an elected position. It is not subject to a public competitive examination. It is not subject to a Senate confirmation process. It is, in practice, an appointment made through the internal administrative machinery of the Appellate Division and the Office of Court Administration — a machinery that operates almost entirely without public visibility.
The Appellate Division, Second Department, supervises the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District. The presiding justice of that department — and the administrative judges who support that position — exercise ultimate authority over the committee's senior appointments. When Gary Casella ultimately left his role as Chief Attorney, the appointment of his successor would have run through that machinery.
The public was not consulted. The bar was not consulted. The experienced staff of the committee itself — including Antonia Cipollone, with her twenty-plus years of service — was apparently not elevated. Instead, an attorney who had most recently been registered at an OCA administrative office in Brooklyn — not at a private firm, not at a DA's office, not at a public defender, not at any institution with a visible track record of adversarial professional accountability work — was installed as Chief Counsel.
We do not know whose recommendation produced this outcome. We do not know what criteria were applied. We do not know whether there was a competitive selection process or whether Osterling was the only name considered. The Office of Court Administration has not explained it. The Appellate Division has not explained it. And the New York State Legislature — which funds these committees — has not demanded an explanation.
That opacity is not accidental. It is the product of a system, as we documented in our broader investigation into the constitutional failures of New York's grievance apparatus, that has deliberately insulated its internal operations from external scrutiny. The same system that imposes years-long investigations on attorney respondents without binding timelines or transparency requirements makes its own senior appointments without any of the accountability mechanisms it applies to everyone else.
VII. Changing Things "For the Worse"
Our sources describe Osterling as not merely inexperienced but as actively attempting to change the operations of the committee in ways that experienced practitioners regard as harmful. We are reporting this characterization as described to us; we do not have visibility into the specific operational changes being discussed internally.
But the general pattern — a newly appointed administrator with thin relevant experience attempting to impose change on an institution with a well-established professional culture — is one with predictable consequences. Institutional knowledge is not easily replaced. The relationships between the committee and the defense bar, between the committee's staff and the Appellate Division, between the committee and the courts of the Ninth District — these relationships are built over decades. They are the product of thousands of cases, hundreds of hearings, and countless informal interactions that determine how the system actually works in practice as opposed to how it looks on an organizational chart.
When those relationships are disrupted by changes imposed by someone who does not fully understand them, the consequences fall on the attorneys who appear before the committee and — ultimately — on the public whose interests the committee is supposed to protect.
This is not hypothetical. It is the documented pattern of institutions where leadership appointments are made on the basis of factors other than professional competence. New York has seen it before. The legal profession in the Ninth District appears to be experiencing it now.
VIII. What Must Happen
The Ethics Reporter is calling for three things, specifically and publicly.
First: The Appellate Division, Second Department, must publicly explain the basis for Courtny Osterling's appointment as Chief Counsel. What were the qualifications considered? Who recommended him? Was there a competitive selection process? If yes, what were the criteria and who evaluated them? The public — and the attorneys whose professional lives are subject to this committee's authority — deserve these answers.
Second: Susan G. Yellen must be removed as Chair of the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District immediately. We have been saying this since January 2026. Her continued service in this role, while her law partner Amy M. Eisenberg remains directly implicated in the Eisenpress judicial misconduct scandal, is an ongoing affront to the integrity of the disciplinary system. That Osterling has failed to address this — or has been unable to address it — does not diminish the urgency. If anything, it compounds it. The Appellate Division itself must act.
Third: Antonia Cipollone must acknowledge her public duty. She is not Courtny Osterling's employee in any meaningful constitutional sense. She is a public servant. The people of the State of New York — whose complaints she processes, whose claims of attorney misconduct she investigates, whose trust in the legal system she is paid to protect — are her principals. If she believes this office is being mismanaged, she owes them more than confidential disclosures to defense lawyers. She owes them the full use of the proper channels available to a public employee with concerns about institutional failure: the Appellate Division, the Office of Court Administration, the Inspector General, and if necessary, the public record.
We understand that coming forward within a bureaucratic institution carries professional risk. We understand that whistleblowing is not easy. But Antonia Cipollone has been in this office for over twenty years. She has seen what this committee is supposed to look like when it functions properly. She has seen, apparently, what it looks like when it does not. The people of the Ninth Judicial District — the clients who file complaints about their attorneys, the attorneys who are investigated, the courts that rely on the committee's integrity — deserve to benefit from what she knows.
Silence, in this context, is not neutrality. It is complicity.
Conclusion: The Question That Must Be Answered
Courtny Osterling was admitted to the New York bar in 2011. He graduated from Syracuse University College of Law. His most recent employment before becoming Chief Counsel appears to have been at an OCA administrative office in Brooklyn. He has no visible background in grievance committee work, no track record as a disciplinary practitioner, and — according to a senior staff attorney who has spent over two decades in this office — no experience and no command of professional respect.
He sits atop the office responsible for policing attorney conduct across five counties. He has done nothing visible to address the Yellen conflict. He is, according to insider accounts, attempting to reshape an office he does not appear to fully understand.
And meanwhile, Susan Yellen remains Chair — the law partner of an attorney directly entangled in the most significant judicial misconduct scandal the Ninth District has seen in a generation, presiding over the very body that is supposed to hold attorneys to account.
The Appellate Division, Second Department — the court that appointed or approved both of these people — owes the public an explanation. The Office of Court Administration owes the public an explanation. Antonia Cipollone owes the public her voice.
The people of the Ninth Judicial District deserve a Grievance Committee led by people who earned their positions through competence, who have the experience to exercise their extraordinary authority wisely, and who are free of the conflicts of interest that have made the committee's current leadership a subject of whispered concern among the very practitioners who appear before it.
They deserve better than what they have. And they will not get better until the people who know — the insiders, the veterans, the experienced staff who have watched this play out — decide that their obligation to the public they serve outweighs their obligation to the bureaucratic hierarchy that employs them.
Antonia Cipollone: you are not his employee. You are theirs.