New York Law Journal, May 19, 2026 —
At some point in life, you probably had this discussion: is medicine a science or an art? The same question might be posed when it comes to valuing a spouse’s business interest in divorce.
Perhaps, as with medicine, the answer is that business valuation comes down to a combination of science and art.
At least one thing is certain, and that is this: if you ask a trial court to decide the value of a divorcing spouse’s business interest, the trier of fact—after considering the evidence presented by the lawyers and the experts—will be tasked with making the final call in answering “what is this worth”?
That brings us to the Judge Ronald Castorina Jr.’s recent decision of AP v. RP, 2025 NY Slip Op 52138(U) (Sup. Ct., Richmond Cty.).
In AP, the parties married in 2008, with one child of the marriage. The defendant owns a 25% interest in “AOC”, a construction company that builds laundromats. The defendant’s brother (CP) also owns 25%, and the remaining 50% of AOC is owned by the defendant’s father (RJP, Sr., referred to in the decision as “Senior”).
The court issued an order for an appraisal and current valuation of AOC to be performed by KLG Business Valuators and Forensic Accountants, LLC (“KLG”) as a neutral. KLG issued a report, which provides that the fair market value of the defendant’s 25% interest is worth $7,900.
The plaintiff in AP filed a motion seeking to have the court reject KLG’s valuation as it was “conducted based on limited documentation and without the participation of all business members, noting that RJP, Sr., who owns 50% of AOC, was not interviewed independently by the evaluators”. According to the plaintiff, “the absence of Senior’s input renders the valuation inherently incomplete and unreliable as to the true fair market value of the business”. The plaintiff also moved to amend the complaint to add Senior as a third-party defendant, however that aspect of the motion is not the subject of this article.
In response, the defendant argued that KLG stated it “was able to attain all information it required” without Senior’s participation from appropriate sources including “the accountant who had all intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the business”. Further, an email from KLG, which responded to inquiries regarding the “need for an interview with Senior”, read as follows: “we did not feel it was necessary to speak to the father as we received all of the information we required”.
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