Divorce litigation in New York is among the most emotionally charged and legally complex work that takes place in the state's Supreme Courts. At its core, every divorce proceeding is about the division of a shared life — its accumulated assets, its debts, its obligations, its records, its future. New York's Domestic Relations Law and the principles of equitable distribution provide the framework within which that division occurs: courts must identify marital property, value it, and allocate it between the parties in a manner that is equitable — fair, though not necessarily equal. When parties are able to reach their own agreement about how to divide what they have built together, the courts generally honor that agreement. Stipulations of settlement in matrimonial proceedings are favored by the law; they represent the parties' own resolution of their disputes, made with the assistance of counsel, and they are not lightly disturbed. When a judge refuses to honor such a stipulation, or refuses to allow discovery into assets covered by such a stipulation, the judge has departed from settled principles that exist for good reason. In Maritzen v. Maritzen, Judge Robert S. Ondrovic of the Westchester County Supreme Court did both. He denied a motion to compel disclosure of information about restricted stock units that had been granted to the plaintiff by his former employer during the marriage — assets that were unambiguously marital property. He also denied enforcement of the provisions of a stipulation of settlement that the parties had already reached regarding the distribution of those same assets. The Appellate Division, Second Department reversed both rulings, ordered that disclosure be compelled and the stipulation enforced, and remitted the matter to the Supreme Court for further proceedings. It was, once again, a full reversal — the appellate court undoing what Ondrovic had done and directing the result that the law required.
The Marriage, the Employer, and the Unvested Shares
The facts of Maritzen v. Maritzen arose in the context of a divorce proceeding in Westchester County Supreme Court. The plaintiff in the divorce — the husband — had been employed during the marriage and had received, from his former employer, grants of restricted stock units (RSUs). RSUs are a form of equity compensation: a company grants an employee a right to receive shares of company stock, subject to vesting conditions (typically continued employment for a specified period). When the RSUs vest, the employee receives actual shares of stock, which can then be held or sold.
RSUs have become an increasingly common form of compensation, particularly in the technology and financial services sectors, but also in many other industries. For many employees, RSUs represent a substantial component of their total compensation — sometimes exceeding their base salary in value. In the context of a marriage, RSUs create complex questions of characterization: are they marital property, separate property, or some combination depending on when they were granted and when they vest?
New York courts have developed a nuanced framework for answering these questions. The foundational principle is that property acquired during a marriage is marital property, subject to equitable distribution. This principle applies to compensation — including deferred compensation like RSUs — earned or granted during the marriage. The "coverture fraction" method and related doctrines allow courts to apportion RSUs between marital and separate property based on the period to which the RSU grant relates.
In the Maritzen case, the specific RSUs at issue were unvested — meaning they had been granted during the marriage but had not yet vested into actual shares. The question of how to treat unvested RSUs in equitable distribution is one that New York courts have addressed in a body of case law holding, broadly, that unvested RSUs earned or attributable to the period of the marriage are marital property subject to distribution, while RSUs attributable to post-marital service may have a separate property component.
The parties in Maritzen v. Maritzen had reached a stipulation of settlement dated August 22, 2022, which addressed the equitable distribution of the marital property consisting of these unvested RSUs. A stipulation of settlement is a binding contract — the parties' agreed resolution of how their marital estate will be divided. It is not a casual document; in matrimonial proceedings, stipulations of settlement are typically negotiated with the assistance of experienced matrimonial attorneys, reviewed by both parties, and executed with the understanding that they will be enforceable in court.
What Ondrovic Did: A Double Refusal
After the stipulation of settlement was reached, questions arose about the plaintiff's compliance with its terms regarding the RSUs. Specifically, the defendant (the wife) brought a motion that contained two branches: first, to compel the plaintiff to disclose information about any consideration he had received in connection with the RSU marital property; and second, to enforce the provisions of the August 22, 2022 stipulation pertaining to the equitable distribution of those RSUs.
These were distinct but related requests. The disclosure branch sought to ensure transparency: the defendant wanted to know whether the plaintiff had received anything in connection with the RSUs — whether they had vested, been sold, been exchanged, or otherwise generated value — and what that value was. Without this information, the defendant could not know whether the equitable distribution provisions of the stipulation had been complied with or what remedies might be appropriate if they had not.
The enforcement branch sought to hold the plaintiff to the agreement he had already made. The parties had negotiated and signed a stipulation specifying how the RSUs would be distributed. The defendant was seeking to enforce that agreement — to have the court order compliance with the terms the plaintiff had already accepted.
Both of these requests had obvious merit. Disclosure of asset information in matrimonial proceedings is a basic feature of the legal process — parties are entitled to know what assets exist and what has become of them. Enforcement of stipulations of settlement is equally fundamental — parties who negotiate and sign binding agreements must be held to those agreements, or the entire framework of settlement in matrimonial proceedings breaks down.
Judge Ondrovic, by order dated April 20, 2023, denied both branches of the motion. He denied the motion to compel disclosure of the RSU information. He denied the motion to enforce the stipulation's provisions regarding the RSUs. The defendant was left without information about what had happened to property she was entitled to share, and without enforcement of an agreement that was supposed to guarantee her share of that property.
Restricted Stock Units as Marital Property: The Legal Framework
To understand why Ondrovic's refusal to order disclosure and enforce the stipulation was legally erroneous, it is necessary to understand how New York law treats RSUs in the context of divorce and equitable distribution.
New York's Equitable Distribution Law, enacted as part of the Domestic Relations Law, establishes that marital property includes "all property acquired by either or both spouses during the marriage and before the execution of a separation agreement or the commencement of a matrimonial action, regardless of the form in which title is held." DRL § 236(B)(1)(c). This is a broad definition — it captures virtually all property, including compensation and benefits, that accrues during the marriage.
The application of this definition to RSUs requires attention to when the RSUs were granted and what they represent. Courts have generally held that RSUs granted as compensation for services performed during the marriage are marital property, because they represent compensation — like salary — for work done during the marital period. The unvested nature of the RSUs does not change their character as marital property; they are simply marital property whose value is contingent on future vesting. Courts have developed methods for valuing and distributing unvested RSUs — methods that protect both parties' interests while accounting for the uncertainty inherent in unvested equity compensation.
The key cases in New York on the treatment of RSUs and similar deferred compensation in equitable distribution establish that: (1) RSUs earned during the marriage are marital property regardless of when they vest; (2) the parties and the court must value and distribute these assets; (3) if the RSUs vest after the divorce, appropriate mechanisms (such as a deferred distribution arrangement or a domestic relations order) can be used to ensure each party receives their share; and (4) a party who receives RSU proceeds without disclosing this to their spouse or the court may be required to account for those proceeds.
In the Maritzen case, the parties had already resolved the distribution question through their August 22, 2022 stipulation of settlement. They had agreed, with the benefit of counsel, on how the RSU marital property would be distributed. This agreement was binding. The question before Ondrovic was not how to divide the RSUs — that had already been decided by the parties — but how to ensure compliance with the existing agreement and to provide disclosure about what had happened to the assets covered by that agreement.
The Enforceability of Stipulations in Matrimonial Proceedings
The legal principles governing the enforceability of stipulations of settlement in matrimonial proceedings are well-settled. New York courts have consistently held that stipulations of settlement are binding contracts that courts will enforce unless there is a showing of fraud, duress, overreaching, or unconscionability. Absent such a showing, a party who has entered into a stipulation of settlement is bound by its terms.
This principle reflects multiple policy considerations. First, it gives effect to the parties' autonomy — their decision to resolve their disputes through negotiation rather than litigation. Courts have long favored settlement of matrimonial disputes; stipulations of settlement reduce the burden on the courts and allow parties to tailor their agreements to their specific circumstances rather than relying on a judge's determination of what equitable distribution requires in their case.
Second, enforcement of stipulations provides certainty and finality. Matrimonial proceedings can be enormously disruptive to both parties' lives; having reached an agreement, both parties have an interest in that agreement being honored so they can move forward. If courts routinely declined to enforce stipulations, parties would have little incentive to negotiate them — they would assume that the agreement could be revisited or ignored if one party changed their mind.
Third, refusal to enforce a stipulation of settlement works an injustice on the party whose negotiated rights are being denied. The defendant in Maritzen had negotiated for specific rights regarding the RSU marital property. Those rights were enshrined in a binding agreement that both parties had executed. When Ondrovic refused to enforce the stipulation's provisions regarding the RSUs, he effectively allowed the plaintiff to benefit from an agreement without being bound by its terms — a result that is both inequitable and contrary to basic contract principles.
The right to compel disclosure in matrimonial proceedings is equally well-established. Domestic Relations Law § 236(B)(4) requires both parties in a matrimonial proceeding to make full financial disclosure. This is not a discretionary requirement that a court can waive; it is a statutory obligation designed to ensure that both parties — and the court — have accurate information about the marital estate. Discovery in matrimonial proceedings is specifically intended to surface this information so that equitable distribution can be accomplished fairly.
When a court refuses to compel disclosure of information about marital assets, it undermines the entire financial transparency framework that equitable distribution requires. A spouse who can conceal information about their assets — who can receive proceeds from marital property without disclosing it to their spouse or the court — has an enormous structural advantage in the division of the marital estate. They can benefit from assets their spouse does not know about, while the distribution proceeds on an incomplete picture of the marital wealth. Ondrovic's refusal to order disclosure was a refusal to enforce the transparency mechanisms that the Domestic Relations Law establishes.
The Appellate Division's Response: Full Reversal
The Appellate Division, Second Department, reviewed Ondrovic's April 20, 2023 order and reversed it in full. The court's order, reported at 225 N.Y.S.3d 346 (2d Dep't 2025), provided:
"ORDERED that the order is reversed, on the law, with costs, those branches of the defendant's motion which were to compel the disclosure of information concerning any consideration that the plaintiff received in connection with certain marital property consisting of unvested restricted stock units that had been granted to the plaintiff by his former employer and, in effect, to enforce the provisions of the stipulation of settlement dated August 22, 2022, pertaining to the equitable distribution of that marital property are granted, and the matter is remitted to the Supreme Court, Westchester County..."
This order grants both branches of the defendant's motion that Ondrovic had denied. The disclosure motion is granted — the plaintiff must provide the information about any consideration he received in connection with the RSU marital property. The enforcement motion is granted — the provisions of the August 22, 2022 stipulation pertaining to the equitable distribution of that marital property must be given effect. The matter is remitted to the Supreme Court, Westchester County, for further proceedings consistent with the appellate ruling.
The "on the law" designation indicates a legal error, not a discretionary one. The Appellate Division is saying that Ondrovic's denial of these motions was not merely a choice that a different judge might have made differently — it was a legally incorrect ruling that did not conform to the applicable standards. The reversal is not a close call or a matter of differing reasonable views about how to exercise discretion. It is a correction of an error of law.
Costs are awarded to the defendant — the party who had to appeal to secure enforcement of the agreement she had already negotiated and of the disclosure she was already legally entitled to receive. The cost award signals the appellate court's view that the appeal was well-taken and that the plaintiff, who defended the flawed rulings below, should bear some of the financial cost of the necessary correction.
The Human Cost of the Reversal: A Spouse Left Waiting
Behind the legal abstractions of the Maritzen reversal is a human story that deserves acknowledgment. A marriage ended. The parties negotiated a settlement. The settlement addressed, among other things, how equity compensation — property that one party had earned during the marriage — would be divided. The negotiation was presumably difficult; matrimonial settlement negotiations always are. But they reached an agreement. And then, when the time came to enforce that agreement, the court refused.
The period between Ondrovic's April 2023 order denying the enforcement and disclosure motions and the Appellate Division's reversal in 2025 was approximately two years. During that period, the defendant was in legal limbo: she had a stipulation of settlement that was supposed to protect her rights to RSU marital property, and a court order that refused to enforce it or even compel the disclosure that would have revealed what had become of that property. She did not know what consideration the plaintiff had received. She could not enforce her negotiated rights. She was, in a very practical sense, cut off from property that the parties had agreed she was entitled to share.
Two years is a long time in the financial life of equity compensation. RSUs vest. Shares are received. Shares can be sold. Proceeds can be spent or transferred or invested. The longer the enforcement is delayed, the more difficult the ultimate accounting may be. Ondrovic's refusal to compel disclosure and enforce the stipulation did not merely delay the defendant's access to her negotiated rights — it potentially compromised the ability to fully account for and recover those rights.
This is the human cost of legal error in the matrimonial context. It is not abstract. It affects real people, real financial security, real futures. The defendant in Maritzen was a party who had done everything right: she negotiated a settlement, she signed the agreement, she sought enforcement through proper legal channels. The legal system, at the trial court level, failed her. The appellate court did not.
Ondrovic in Matrimonial Proceedings: A Pattern of Errors
The Maritzen reversal is not the first time Ondrovic's matrimonial rulings have been reversed by the Second Department. This publication has previously reported on the reversal in Jacobson v. Jacobson, where Ondrovic ordered the payment of $45,000 in interim counsel fees without the evidentiary foundation that New York's Domestic Relations Law requires — an award that the Appellate Division found legally unsupported and reversed, with costs. The Maritzen reversal follows the same pattern: Ondrovic's ruling in a matrimonial matter, reversed by the Second Department for legal error, with costs awarded to the prevailing appellant.
The matrimonial jurisdiction of the New York Supreme Court is one of the most consequential areas of the court's work. Divorce proceedings determine the financial futures of parties who are often at their most vulnerable — emotionally destabilized by the dissolution of their marriage, anxious about their financial security, dependent on the court to apply the law fairly and accurately. A trial court judge in the matrimonial part must be meticulous in applying the Domestic Relations Law, in evaluating the parties' financial disclosures, in enforcing the agreements that parties reach, and in ordering the discovery that makes fair distribution possible.
The Maritzen reversal suggests that Ondrovic's matrimonial rulings have not always met this standard. The refusal to compel disclosure in a case where disclosure was legally required — and where the parties had already reached an agreement about the assets whose disclosure was sought — is a significant error. The refusal to enforce a binding stipulation of settlement is an error with potentially severe consequences for the party whose rights the stipulation was supposed to protect. Both errors were corrected on appeal. But the correction came only after two years of delay and the expense of an appellate proceeding that should not have been necessary.
RSUs, Equity Compensation, and the Modern Marital Estate
The Maritzen case raises issues that will only become more common as equity compensation becomes a larger share of many workers' total pay. In 2025, RSUs, stock options, performance shares, and other forms of deferred equity compensation are routine in a wide range of industries. Tech workers, finance professionals, pharmaceutical researchers, and employees at publicly traded companies of all kinds regularly receive equity grants as part of their compensation packages. When these employees divorce, the treatment of their equity compensation in equitable distribution becomes a significant issue.
New York's approach to equity compensation in divorce is more sophisticated than many people realize. The courts do not simply look at the current value of shares; they examine when the grants were made, what service period they were intended to compensate, how vesting schedules relate to the marital period, and whether the compensation was for past service, future service, or some combination. A grant made during the marriage to reward services performed during the marriage is treated differently than a grant made after the marriage to compensate for post-marital services.
The unvested RSUs in Maritzen illustrate this complexity. They had been granted to the plaintiff by his former employer during the marriage — but they were unvested, meaning the shares had not yet been delivered. The value of unvested RSUs can be difficult to determine with precision because vesting is contingent on continued employment and other conditions. Yet the fact that the RSUs were unvested at the time of the divorce does not remove them from the marital estate; it simply makes their valuation and distribution more complex.
That complexity is one reason why parties often settle these issues through stipulation — they avoid the cost and uncertainty of litigation over the precise value and allocation of unvested equity compensation by reaching their own agreement about how to handle it. The August 22, 2022 stipulation in Maritzen represented exactly this kind of negotiated resolution. By refusing to enforce it, Ondrovic undermined the parties' own solution to a complex legal problem and created additional litigation costs and uncertainty where the parties had tried to achieve finality.
Disclosure in Matrimonial Proceedings: Non-Negotiable Transparency
The disclosure branch of the Maritzen motion deserves separate attention because it implicates a principle that is central to the integrity of matrimonial proceedings: the obligation of parties to make full financial disclosure.
In New York, the financial disclosure obligations in matrimonial proceedings are set out in the Domestic Relations Law and in the Uniform Rules for the Matrimonial Parts. Both parties must file statements of net worth. Both parties are subject to deposition and document discovery. Both parties must disclose their assets, liabilities, income, and expenses. This transparency is not optional; it is mandatory, because equitable distribution cannot be fair if one party conceals assets or withholds financial information.
Courts take these obligations seriously. When parties fail to make required disclosures, courts have broad authority to impose sanctions, to draw adverse inferences, to order production of documents, and to take other measures to enforce the transparency the law requires. The authority to compel disclosure is not a peripheral aspect of the court's matrimonial jurisdiction — it is central to the court's ability to do its job.
When Ondrovic denied the motion to compel disclosure of information about the consideration the plaintiff received in connection with the RSU marital property, he was refusing to exercise precisely this authority. The defendant was entitled to know what had become of marital property. The plaintiff had an obligation to disclose that information. The court had the power — indeed, the obligation — to compel that disclosure when it was not forthcoming. Ondrovic's refusal to do so was a legal error, and the Appellate Division's reversal correctly identified it as such.
The compelled disclosure, now ordered by the Second Department's reversal, will provide the defendant with information she should have had years ago: what consideration, if any, did the plaintiff receive in connection with the RSU marital property? If the RSUs vested and shares were received, those shares — or their proceeds if sold — represent marital property to which the defendant has a claim under the stipulation of settlement. The disclosure is the first step toward whatever accounting and enforcement proceedings may follow.
The Accumulating Record: A Judge, His Background, and His Reversals
The Maritzen reversal, standing alongside the Jacobson reversal and the reversals this publication has documented in personal injury and premises liability cases, contributes to an accumulating record that is difficult to interpret as anything other than a systematic pattern. Judge Robert S. Ondrovic, who took the bench in 2021 after approximately thirty years at Ondrovic & Hurley, a defense-side personal injury firm in White Plains, has been reversed in a substantial majority of the civil appeals from his decisions that have reached the Appellate Division, Second Department since he began his term. This figure is documented through Westlaw Litigation Analytics and has been cited in appellate briefs filed at the Second Department.
The pattern is not limited to one category of case. The reversals span personal injury (the serious injury threshold cases), premises liability (Caccioppoli), and matrimonial proceedings (Jacobson and Maritzen). Across all of these categories, the common thread is the same: premature dispositive rulings, refusals to apply meritorious procedural motions as the law requires, and a tendency to reach results that favor early termination of cases or denial of relief to the party seeking enforcement.
In personal injury cases, that tendency manifests as the granting of summary judgment motions where the prima facie burden has not been met — thereby dismissing cases that should have survived. In premises liability cases, it manifests as accepting a defense expert's opinion as conclusive when it merely raises issues of fact for the jury. In matrimonial cases, it manifests as denying enforcement of binding stipulations and refusing to compel the financial disclosure that the law mandates.
The common thread — the organizing principle that links these disparate errors — is a judicial posture that leans toward terminating cases and denying relief, rather than allowing cases to proceed and enforcing the legal rights that parties have established through litigation or negotiation. This is not a neutral posture. It systematically disadvantages certain categories of litigants: injured plaintiffs who need their cases to survive summary judgment; premises liability claimants who need their factual disputes resolved at trial; and divorcing spouses who need their settlement agreements enforced and their financial information disclosed.
Whether this posture reflects conscious intent, unconscious bias shaped by decades of defense practice, or simple legal error — perhaps some combination of all three — is not a question that can be definitively answered from the appellate record. What the record establishes, with increasing clarity, is the pattern itself. And the pattern is one that the Second Department has been correcting, case by case, for nearly five years.
The Remittal and What Follows
The Appellate Division's decision in Maritzen remits the matter to the Supreme Court, Westchester County, for further proceedings consistent with the appellate ruling. This means the case goes back to the trial court — though presumably not to Ondrovic, given that the appellate court has now corrected his rulings on remand — with directions to compel the requested disclosure and to enforce the relevant provisions of the August 22, 2022 stipulation of settlement.
The practical work on remand will involve several steps. The plaintiff must disclose the information he was ordered to conceal — whatever consideration he received in connection with the RSU marital property. Once that information is disclosed, the parties and the court can assess whether the stipulation's equitable distribution provisions have been complied with and, if not, what remedy is appropriate. If RSU proceeds were received and not shared or accounted for pursuant to the stipulation, the court has a range of remedies available: ordering payment of the defendant's share, imposing sanctions for non-compliance, or fashioning such other relief as is equitable under the circumstances.
This is not a simple process, and it may not be swift. But it is the process the defendant was entitled to in 2023 when she brought her motion, and which Ondrovic's order improperly denied her. The Appellate Division's reversal sets it in motion.
Conclusion: Equity, Disclosure, and the Meaning of a Stipulation
The Appellate Division, Second Department's decision in Maritzen v. Maritzen, 225 N.Y.S.3d 346 (2d Dep't 2025), Docket No. 2023-05695, is a decision about a divorce and a set of restricted stock units. But it is also a decision about principles that go to the heart of what matrimonial courts are supposed to do: enforce the agreements that parties reach, compel the disclosure that the law requires, and ensure that both parties to a dissolution of marriage receive the property they are entitled to share.
Judge Ondrovic failed to do these things. He denied enforcement of a binding stipulation. He denied a motion to compel disclosure of information about marital assets. He did both of these things in a case involving complex equity compensation — a type of asset that, in the modern economy, is an increasingly significant component of marital estates and that requires careful, law-abiding treatment in equitable distribution proceedings.
The Second Department reversed him fully. It granted both branches of the motion he had denied. It awarded costs to the defendant who had to appeal to obtain what she was legally entitled to receive in the first place. And it remitted the matter for the further proceedings that should have happened two years ago.
This reversal joins others in the record that this publication has been compiling and analyzing. The pattern of reversals in Ondrovic's cases — documented by Westlaw Litigation Analytics and cited in appellate briefs — reflects a frequency and consistency of legal error that the Second Department has been correcting, one case at a time, since 2021. The Maritzen reversal is not the last entry in this record. As long as Ondrovic continues to enter orders that depart from settled legal principles, the Appellate Division will continue to correct them.
For the defendant in Maritzen, the long road through appellate litigation has finally produced the result the law required from the beginning. Her stipulation will be enforced. The disclosure she sought will be ordered. The marital property she negotiated for will at last be the subject of the accounting and distribution proceedings it always should have been. That is what the system promised her. It took too long, and it cost too much. But it delivered.
Note: This article is based on the published decision of the Appellate Division, Second Department in Maritzen v. Maritzen, 225 N.Y.S.3d 346 (2d Dep't 2025), Docket No. 2023-05695. All legal analysis reflects matters of public record. The underlying proceedings on remand are ongoing and are not addressed here.