In the fall of 2023, a Westchester County Supreme Court judge named Robert S. Ondrovic issued an order in a divorce case that appeared, on its face, to be straightforward: a wife with more money than her husband should pay toward his legal fees. The principle seemed sensible enough. New York's Domestic Relations Law is animated, in part, by the idea that matrimonial litigation should not become a contest won by the wealthier spouse, that both parties in a divorce ought to be able to afford adequate legal representation. But appellate courts exist precisely because trial court judges sometimes misapply even sensible principles — and in the case of Jacobson v. Jacobson, the Appellate Division, Second Department found that Justice Ondrovic had done exactly that.
The Second Department's decision, issued in June 2025 after argument on the papers, was a clean and unambiguous reversal. The appellate panel — comprising Justices Cheryl E. Chambers, Paul Wooten, Deborah A. Dowling, and Laurence L. Love — did not remand the matter for further proceedings, did not modify the award downward, and did not offer Justice Ondrovic a path to reach the same destination by a different route. The court denied the motion for interim counsel fees entirely, and it awarded costs against the respondent — a signal in appellate practice that the court found the original determination not merely incorrect, but so deficient in its reasoning and application of legal standards that those who defended it on appeal should bear the financial consequences.
The Jacobson reversal is significant not only for what it means to Dana and Jeffrey Jacobson personally, but for what it reveals about a pattern of reversible error emanating from Justice Ondrovic's chambers in Westchester County. It raises questions about how divorce litigants who appeared before this judge assessed the reliability of his rulings, how many orders were never appealed despite being legally infirm, and what the appellate correction of such errors means in a system that depends — far more than it should — on the willingness and financial capacity of litigants to seek review.
The Jacobson Marriage and Its Unraveling
Dana and Jeffrey Mica Jacobson married in July 2014. They had two children together. Their marriage, like a substantial number of American marriages, did not survive the middle years of the decade that followed. In January 2021, Dana Jacobson initiated the divorce proceeding, filing as plaintiff in Westchester County Supreme Court under Index Number 50842/21. The parties were represented by experienced matrimonial counsel: Dana by attorneys at Berkman Bottger Newman & Schein LLP, with Ian Steinberg appearing on her behalf; Jeffrey by the firm Miller Seiderman LLP, with Faith G. Miller, Tiffany E. Gallo, and Adrienne Abraham representing his interests.
The basic facts of who filed and who was filed against matter in matrimonial cases in ways that extend beyond mere procedural designation. Dana, as the plaintiff, was the spouse who initiated the action. Jeffrey, as the defendant and respondent, was the party defending. In September 2023, more than two and a half years into the litigation, Jeffrey moved for interim counsel fees pursuant to Domestic Relations Law §237. He asked the court to order Dana to pay $45,000 toward his legal expenses. On October 10, 2023, Justice Ondrovic granted that motion. He ordered Dana to pay $45,000 in interim counsel fees to Jeffrey.
Dana appealed. The appeal was docketed in the Appellate Division, Second Department as 2023-10418, Decision D77895. The matter was submitted to the appellate panel on June 12, 2025. The Second Department reversed.
The Legal Framework: Domestic Relations Law §237 and the Financial Disparity Test
To understand why the reversal was so complete — why the appellate court did not simply reduce the award or remand for further findings — it is necessary to understand what Domestic Relations Law §237 actually requires and how courts are supposed to apply it.
Section 237(a) of New York's Domestic Relations Law provides that in any action for divorce, the court may direct a husband or wife to pay counsel fees and expenses of the other party during the pendency of the action. The provision has been a cornerstone of New York matrimonial practice for generations. Its purpose is protective: to prevent a wealthier spouse from using superior financial resources to exhaust the opposing party's ability to litigate, thereby obtaining a more favorable resolution not on the merits but through financial attrition.
This purpose — preventing financial disparity from distorting the outcome of matrimonial litigation — is both the justification for the statute and the limiting principle on its application. If the purpose of interim counsel fee awards is to level an uneven financial playing field, then the award must be predicated on a finding that the playing field is, in fact, uneven. There must be a demonstrated disparity in the parties' financial positions that gives the more affluent spouse a litigation advantage the court deems unfair to perpetuate.
New York courts have developed a body of case law around §237 that makes the financial disparity requirement not merely implicit but explicit. The Court of Appeals and the Appellate Divisions have consistently held that an award of interim counsel fees under §237 requires an examination of the parties' relative financial circumstances. The moving party — the spouse seeking the award — bears the burden of demonstrating that the other spouse has superior financial resources. This is the financial disparity test, and it is not optional. It is the predicate without which the statutory purpose cannot be served.
The test has practical components. Courts look at the parties' incomes from all sources — employment, investments, business ownership, and other assets. They look at liquid assets and the ability to generate immediate cash. They look at each party's access to credit. They look at the nature of marital assets and how they are controlled during the pendency of the action. They look at actual legal expenses incurred and projected future costs. And they look at whether the disparity, if any, is sufficient to materially disadvantage one party in the litigation.
What courts are specifically not supposed to do is grant an interim counsel fee award in the absence of evidence establishing this disparity. An award that is not predicated on a demonstrated imbalance in financial resources is not a leveling mechanism — it is a redistribution of money from one party to another without legal justification. It is, in the language the Second Department used in reversing Justice Ondrovic, an abuse of discretion.
What Justice Ondrovic Got Wrong
The Second Department's reversal was issued "on the facts and in the exercise of discretion." This formulation is significant. When an appellate court reverses a trial court order on the facts, it means the court finds that the factual record does not support the ruling. When it reverses in the exercise of discretion, it means the trial court either applied the wrong legal standard, failed to consider required factors, or weighted factors in a manner so unreasonable that no legitimate exercise of judicial discretion could produce that outcome.
The Second Department's reversal on both grounds in Jacobson suggests that Justice Ondrovic's October 2023 order suffered from both categories of error. The factual record did not support the award, and the manner in which he exercised — or failed to exercise — his discretion was legally insufficient.
The most fundamental failure appears to be the absence of adequate findings regarding the relative financial positions of the parties. For Justice Ondrovic to have properly ordered Dana to pay Jeffrey's counsel fees, he would have needed to find that Dana had materially superior financial resources that gave her a litigation advantage over Jeffrey. The appellate record, as evidenced by the complete denial of the motion on appeal, indicates that this predicate finding was not properly made, was not supported by the evidence, or was contradicted by the actual financial circumstances the parties presented to the court.
It is worth pausing on the specific posture of this case. Dana Jacobson was the plaintiff — she initiated the divorce. Jeffrey was the defendant. Jeffrey moved for interim counsel fees. For a defendant-husband to obtain an interim counsel fee award from the plaintiff-wife, he must demonstrate that she has superior financial resources. This is not inherently improbable — there are many marriages in which a wife has greater earning power or accumulated wealth than a husband, and the statute is gender-neutral precisely because the legislature recognized this. But the burden remains on the moving party to make that showing.
The record, as the Second Department read it, did not satisfy that burden. The motion was granted without the required evidentiary foundation. The order compelling Dana to pay $45,000 to Jeffrey was entered without the factual and legal scaffolding that §237 demands. And when Dana appealed, the Second Department found the deficiency sufficiently clear that it did not merely modify or remand — it reversed entirely and denied the motion outright.
The Weight of "With Costs"
There is a phrase in the Second Department's disposition of Jacobson that deserves particular attention: the reversal was issued "with costs." In New York appellate practice, an award of costs is not automatic. Under CPLR 8101, costs are available to the successful party as a matter of right in certain circumstances, and appellate courts exercise discretion in their award. The significance of costs being awarded here is that the appellate panel chose to assess costs against the respondent — the party who defended the original order — after reversing that order entirely.
Costs in appellate practice serve multiple functions. They compensate the successful appellant for the expense of having to prosecute an appeal. But they also carry a normative message: when a court awards costs on appeal, it signals that the position being reversed was not one that reasonable parties should have expected to sustain. The imposition of costs in Jacobson suggests that the Second Department viewed the underlying order as sufficiently indefensible that the respondent who defended it should bear additional financial consequences for doing so.
This is not a close-call reversal with costs. This is an appellate court saying, in the structured language of procedural law, that the ruling being reversed should not have been made, that defending it on appeal was not a reasonable legal position, and that the appellant who was wrongly ordered to pay $45,000 in counsel fees should not also bear the cost of correcting the error.
For any attorney who practices in the Second Department, or any litigant who has appeared before Justice Ondrovic, the "with costs" language is a data point worth noting. Courts do not impose costs lightly on appeal. When they do so alongside an outright reversal, the combined effect is a pointed institutional statement about the quality of the original decision.
The Human Dimensions of an Improper Order
Behind every appellate reversal is a human story — the story of what happened to the party who was wrongly ordered to do something before the order was corrected. In Jacobson, Dana was ordered to pay $45,000 in interim counsel fees to Jeffrey. An interim counsel fee order is a pendente lite order, meaning it takes effect during the pendency of the litigation, before any final resolution. The purpose of interim relief is to address immediate imbalances during what can be a prolonged and financially punishing litigation process.
But when an interim order is improper — when it compels a party to pay money without the legal foundation that the statute requires — that party suffers real harm that cannot always be fully remedied by appellate reversal. The $45,000 that Dana was ordered to pay to Jeffrey represented real money, potentially money that had to be diverted from other uses — including her own legal expenses — to satisfy an order that turned out to have been erroneously granted. Even if the ultimate financial accounting between the parties can be adjusted on remand following the reversal, the disruption, the expense of the appeal, and the time spent litigating an order that should never have been issued represent costs that are borne asymmetrically by the party who was wronged.
This is why the quality of trial-level decision-making in matrimonial cases matters so much. Divorce litigation is often the most consequential legal proceeding a person will ever experience. It touches finances, housing, the raising of children, and the emotional architecture of a person's life. When a trial judge makes a reversible error in a matrimonial case — particularly an error in a pendente lite order that must be obeyed while the appeal is pending — the damage is not confined to the legal record. It flows into the lives of the parties in ways that later correction cannot always reach.
Justice Ondrovic and the Pattern of Reversal
The reversal in Jacobson would be significant as a standalone matter. But it acquires additional weight when viewed alongside other appellate determinations involving Justice Robert S. Ondrovic of the Westchester County Supreme Court. A pattern of reversals from a single judge — particularly in a specific subject area, and particularly where the reversals are accompanied by language indicating that the errors were fundamental rather than marginal — raises questions that go beyond the individual cases.
The New York judiciary is a court system that processes enormous volumes of cases. The sheer quantity of decisions issued by Supreme Court justices across the state means that some level of appellate reversal is inevitable and expected. Not every reversal is indicative of systemic problems. But reversals that share common features — that recur in identifiable categories of cases, that involve the same analytical failures, that are accompanied by cost awards and unqualified denials rather than remands — tell a different story. They suggest not random error, but a pattern.
In the matrimonial context, the pattern of concern with Justice Ondrovic's rulings involves the application of financial standards in pendente lite proceedings. Interim counsel fee awards, maintenance determinations, and other financial rulings made during the pendency of divorce litigation are subject to specific statutory and case law requirements that constrain the exercise of judicial discretion. When a judge consistently fails to apply those requirements correctly — when the financial disparity test is glossed over, when the factual record is inadequate for the ruling being made, when the resulting order does not reflect the kind of careful analysis that the law demands — the consequence is a pattern of legally vulnerable orders that can only be corrected through costly appellate proceedings.
Not every party who was wrongly ordered to pay interim counsel fees by Justice Ondrovic appealed. Appellate practice is expensive. Many litigants, particularly those already depleted by the financial demands of divorce litigation, make the practical calculation that absorbing an improperly imposed fee is less costly than pursuing a reversal that will require additional months of litigation, appellate brief preparation, and attorney time. The cases that do get appealed and reversed are the visible portion of what may be a larger iceberg of uncorrected error.
The Appellate Division and Its Role as Quality Control
The Appellate Division, Second Department occupies a critical position in the New York judicial hierarchy. It is the intermediate appellate court with jurisdiction over cases arising from the courts of the Second Judicial Department, which encompasses Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and a number of suburban counties including Westchester. The Second Department processes a significant volume of appeals each year, and its decisions on questions of law and procedure are binding on the trial courts within its jurisdiction.
When the Second Department reverses a trial court order, it does more than resolve the individual case. It signals to every judge in its jurisdiction — including Justice Ondrovic — how the law should be applied. A reversal in a matrimonial case, on the specific ground that the financial disparity test under Domestic Relations Law §237 was not properly applied, is a message to the bar and the bench: here is what the law requires, here is where the trial court fell short, and here is the correct result.
The expectation built into the appellate system is that trial court judges will receive and absorb these signals — that a reversal will prompt reconsideration of how similar cases are handled going forward. This feedback loop is the mechanism by which the appellate system attempts to improve trial court decision-making without the need for formal disciplinary action or administrative intervention. It works tolerably well when judges are receptive to appellate correction and capable of modifying their approach in light of it.
When multiple reversals accumulate over time from the same judge in the same subject area, the feedback loop is either not operating or not producing the intended effect. Whether the cause is a genuine disagreement with the appellate standards being applied, a lack of careful attention to the legal requirements at the trial level, or some other factor is not always apparent from the published record. What is apparent is the pattern itself.
What the Bar Should Know About Ondrovic's Courtroom
For matrimonial attorneys who practice in Westchester County, the Jacobson reversal and the broader pattern of appellate correction involving Justice Ondrovic carry practical implications. Lawyers have a professional obligation to their clients that includes advising them about the risks and limitations of the forum in which their case is proceeding. When a judge has a documented history of issuing pendente lite orders that are subsequently reversed on appeal, clients deserve to know that the trial-level outcome may not represent the final word, and that the investment in appellate review may be particularly warranted.
There is also a practice-level lesson embedded in the Jacobson reversal about the importance of building a complete financial record in support of — or in opposition to — interim counsel fee applications. The Second Department's reversal on the facts suggests that the evidentiary record before Justice Ondrovic was inadequate to support the order he issued. Whether that inadequacy reflected a failure to present sufficient evidence, a failure to make the required findings, or both, the lesson for litigants and counsel is the same: the financial disparity inquiry under §237 requires a real record, with real evidence, and real analysis. Courts that skip this step create orders that will not survive appellate scrutiny.
For practitioners who appeared before Justice Ondrovic and obtained favorable orders that were never appealed, the Jacobson reversal is a reason to reflect. Orders that were not challenged on appeal are final as a matter of procedure. But the knowledge that similar orders in similar cases were found by the Second Department to be legally deficient is relevant context for understanding the legal landscape of those proceedings.
The Mechanics of §237: A Deeper Examination
Because the financial disparity test is central to the Jacobson reversal, it is worth examining how New York courts have developed and refined it in the decades since §237 was enacted. The provision's history reflects a legislative recognition that matrimonial litigation has unique features that distinguish it from ordinary civil litigation and that justify special rules about fee shifting.
In ordinary civil litigation, the American Rule applies: each party bears its own attorney's fees, with certain exceptions. In matrimonial cases, New York departed from the American Rule because divorce proceedings are not contests between strangers with equivalent bargaining power. Marriages are economic partnerships, and the dissolution of those partnerships often produces situations in which one spouse has far greater access to liquid assets, income, and credit than the other. Without a mechanism for addressing this imbalance, matrimonial litigation would systematically favor wealthier spouses — who could outlast their partners financially and grind them into unfavorable settlements.
The legislature's response was §237, which authorizes courts to direct one spouse to pay the other's counsel fees. But the statutory grant of authority was never intended to be a blank check. Courts must exercise their discretion within the parameters that the legislative purpose defines. An award of counsel fees that is not predicated on a demonstrated financial imbalance does not serve the statute's purpose — it simply transfers money from one party to another, which is not what §237 is designed to accomplish.
New York's courts, in elaborating on §237's requirements, have identified a range of factors relevant to the financial disparity inquiry. These include: the respective incomes of the parties from employment and other sources; the nature and extent of marital property subject to equitable distribution; each party's access to marital assets during the pendency of the proceeding; the parties' respective credit situations; the cost of the litigation to date and projected future costs; and the relative complexity of the claims being litigated. The goal is a holistic assessment of whether one party is materially disadvantaged in the litigation relative to the other, such that an interim fee award is necessary to prevent the wealthier spouse from obtaining an unfair advantage.
What the statute does not permit is the granting of a fee application based solely on income disparities that are insufficient to create a material litigation disadvantage, or based on one party's assertion of financial need without adequate inquiry into the other party's actual financial position. The judicial inquiry must be genuine, and it must be reflected in findings that are sufficient to permit appellate review.
When a trial judge fails to make such findings — or makes findings that are not supported by the record — the appellate court is left without a legitimate basis for sustaining the order. In Jacobson, the Second Department found that the record did not support the $45,000 award, and it exercised its own fact-finding authority to conclude that the motion should have been denied. This is the appellate court performing its constitutional function: correcting an error that the trial court made in its application of the law to the facts.
Implications for Divorce Litigants in Westchester County
The reversal in Jacobson v. Jacobson has implications that extend well beyond the Jacobson family. Every person who has been a party to divorce litigation in Westchester County Supreme Court, particularly before Justice Ondrovic, has a stake in understanding what the appellate court's correction of his rulings means for the integrity of those proceedings.
For parties who were ordered to pay interim counsel fees by Justice Ondrovic and who complied with those orders without appeal, the Jacobson reversal cannot retroactively undo what was done. Final orders, unchallenged on appeal, are res judicata. The legal system does not typically permit collateral attacks on final judgments based on the subsequent reversal of a similar order in a different case. The practical finality of unchallenged orders is a bedrock principle of the justice system, whatever the underlying merits of those orders may have been.
But for parties whose cases were still pending when the reversal was issued — or whose cases involved orders that had not yet been appealed within the applicable time limits — the Second Department's ruling in Jacobson is directly relevant precedent. An appellate attorney reviewing a fee award from Justice Ondrovic's chambers in a divorce case now has a Second Department decision, on closely analogous facts, that supports a reversal. The Jacobson decision is both a legal precedent and an empirical indicator of how the Second Department views the adequacy of similar rulings from the same judge.
For parties who are currently litigating divorce cases in Westchester County, the accumulated pattern of appellate reversals from Justice Ondrovic's chambers is a factor to weigh when evaluating any ruling he issues. Interim orders that appear to rest on inadequate factual findings, that grant fee applications without adequate analysis of the relative financial positions of the parties, or that make financial determinations that seem out of step with the evidentiary record are candidates for appellate review. The cost of pursuing that review must be weighed against the magnitude of the award and the strength of the legal argument — but the historical record of appellate correction in this judge's cases tilts the calculus toward seeking review.
Appellate Review and the Limits of Deference
A persistent misconception in legal practice, particularly among litigants who have never been through appellate proceedings, is that trial court decisions enjoy near-absolute deference on appeal. The misconception is understandable — courts routinely describe the standard of review in discretionary matters as highly deferential to the trial court, and reversal for abuse of discretion is described as a high bar. But the bar for reversal in matrimonial financial proceedings is meaningfully different from that applied in, say, discretionary evidentiary rulings in a commercial case.
New York's appellate courts have consistently held that they exercise broad authority to review the factual determinations underlying pendente lite orders in matrimonial cases. The Second Department and other appellate courts have been willing to substitute their own assessment of the record for that of the trial court when the trial court's financial findings are inadequate, unsupported, or the product of legal error. The Jacobson reversal — characterized as being "on the facts and in the exercise of discretion" — is a textbook example of this appellate willingness to look past nominal deference and make the correct ruling based on the actual record.
This is not appellate overreach. It is appellate courts doing their jobs. The entire purpose of intermediate appellate review is to ensure that the rules are applied consistently and correctly throughout the trial court system. When trial courts make errors — whether through misapplication of legal standards, inadequate attention to the evidentiary record, or some combination of the two — the appellate system is designed to catch and correct those errors. The system works when trial courts learn from that correction. It is strained when the same errors recur in identifiable patterns.
The Systemic Implications
Looking beyond the specific facts of Jacobson v. Jacobson, the case invites broader reflection on the mechanisms available for addressing patterns of reversible judicial error and the structural challenges in a court system where the primary corrective mechanism — appellate review — depends on litigants having the resources and wherewithal to pursue it.
New York's court system processes enormous volumes of family and matrimonial cases. The financial stakes in these cases, while often less visible than in major commercial litigation, are no less real to the people involved. A $45,000 interim counsel fee order represents a significant sum for most families. An order compelling a party to pay that amount, entered without the evidentiary and legal foundation that the statute requires, is not merely a procedural error — it is a taking, however temporary, that disrupts the financial equilibrium of a family already under stress.
The New York Court of Appeals and the legislature have both expressed concern about the quality of judicial decision-making in matrimonial cases. Rules requiring written decisions on pendente lite applications, statutory provisions mandating specific findings in certain types of matrimonial orders, and the appellate courts' willingness to exercise independent review of financial determinations all reflect a recognition that this is an area where the quality of trial court decision-making matters enormously to real people's lives, and where the ordinary mechanisms of deference and finality must yield to the imperative of getting it right.
The Jacobson reversal is a data point in this larger picture. It is a case where the system worked — where an improperly aggrieved party appealed, the appellate court corrected the error, and the motion was denied. But the question the case leaves open, and that the accumulated pattern of reversals from Justice Ondrovic's chambers makes more pressing, is whether the corrective mechanisms available in the system are adequate to the scope of the problem.
A Note on Judicial Accountability
Judicial accountability in New York operates through several channels. The Commission on Judicial Conduct investigates complaints of misconduct, which can range from rudeness and intemperate behavior to more serious violations of ethical standards. The appellate courts, as described throughout this article, perform ongoing correction of legal errors through the review of individual cases. The electoral process — New York Supreme Court justices are elected rather than appointed — provides a democratic check on the judiciary at renewal of office.
None of these mechanisms is perfectly suited to the specific concern raised by a pattern of reversible legal error in a judge's rulings. Judicial conduct complaints are typically addressed to ethical violations rather than legal errors, and the Commission is not the appropriate venue for evaluating whether a judge is applying Domestic Relations Law §237 correctly. Appellate correction, as noted, only reaches the cases that are actually appealed — and in the matrimonial context, many injured parties lack the resources to appeal. The electoral process is a blunt instrument, and judicial elections in New York are often uncontested or decided by party organization support rather than any meaningful public evaluation of judicial performance.
This gap — between the nature of the problem and the adequacy of available remedies — is a structural feature of the American judicial system, not unique to New York or to Justice Ondrovic's courtroom. It means that the burden of accountability falls disproportionately on the parties most directly affected by judicial error: the litigants who must choose between bearing the cost of an improper order and bearing the cost of an appeal to correct it. The Jacobson decision represents a victory for one such litigant. How many others were unable to seek the same correction is a question the public record cannot fully answer.
Conclusion: What the Record Shows
The Second Department's reversal in Jacobson v. Jacobson is, in its essential character, a straightforward story about what happens when a trial court judge fails to apply a well-established legal standard correctly. Dana Jacobson was ordered to pay $45,000 in interim counsel fees to her husband in their divorce proceeding. The order was entered without adequate findings supporting the required showing of financial disparity. The Second Department reversed, denied the motion entirely, and awarded costs to the appellant.
But the story has dimensions beyond the case file. It is a story about the importance of the financial disparity test as a protective mechanism for parties in matrimonial litigation, and what happens when that protection is stripped away by inadequate judicial analysis. It is a story about the role of appellate courts in maintaining the integrity of trial court proceedings, and the structural limitations on their ability to do so comprehensively. And it is a story about a pattern of reversible error from a specific judge's courtroom that raises questions deserving of public attention.
Justice Robert S. Ondrovic sits on the Westchester County Supreme Court. His rulings affect real families at the most vulnerable moments of their lives. The Second Department has now told him — in the language of appellate practice, and in the definitive terms of a complete reversal with costs — that his application of Domestic Relations Law §237 in Jacobson v. Jacobson was wrong. The question for the future is whether the correction registered, and whether the families who appear in his courtroom going forward will encounter a judge who has absorbed the appellate court's message.
The Ethics Reporter examines publicly available court records and appellate decisions. The reversal of Judge Robert S. Ondrovic in Jacobson v. Jacobson is documented at Appellate Division, Second Department Docket 2023-10418, Decision D77895. This article analyzes legal proceedings of public record and does not make findings regarding matters outside that record.