On July 31, 2026 Magistrate Judge Peggy Cross-Goldenberg denied a premotion conference as moot in Union Mutual Fire Insurance Co. v. Subin Associates and told the parties no discovery schedule issues until sixteen separately pending motions to dismiss are resolved. Litigation funder Gregory Elefterakis and Case Cash Funding sit on that Brooklyn docket as codefendants alongside the firm. Every record fact here rests on a docket aggregator rather than a direct read of the filed order.
On July 27, 2026, defendants in Union Mutual Fire Insurance Co. v. Subin Associates, LLP filed a joint letter in the Eastern District of New York. It answered plaintiffs' notice of additional authority in a carrier RICO case that has been sitting in Brooklyn federal court for fourteen months. The docket is 1:25-cv-02652, the case the defense bar's own tracking calls SUBIN III. Four days later, on July 31, Magistrate Judge Peggy Cross-Goldenberg denied a premotion conference request as moot and told the parties not to expect a discovery schedule at all. Sixteen separately pending motions to dismiss sit in front of her first. Nothing else on this docket moves until those sixteen clear.
That order is a posture shift, not a ruling on the merits. A year ago the fight in SUBIN III was whether the case would survive at all. Now it is traffic control. Sixteen motions is not a typo. It is nearly every named party in the case asking to be let out before discovery starts, and the magistrate just told all of them the docket will wait for the pile to clear. A premotion conference is usually the shortcut a party asks for when it wants to argue for a narrower motion before filing one. Denying that request as moot means the shortcut is gone. The sixteen motions already on file are the whole conversation now.
The record mechanism is the motion count itself. PacerMonitor's docket summary, reporting the July 31 order, describes a court declining to set any scheduling order while sixteen separately pending motions to dismiss remain undecided. That is a docket aggregator reporting the entry, not a direct read of the filed order, which sits behind PACER. The mechanism it reports is plain. No discovery clock starts in this case until the motion practice clears. Sixteen separate filings, sixteen separate rulings, before a single deposition gets noticed.
Free weekly intelligence for executives responsible for litigation exposure: the named decision-makers, dollar exposure, operating consequence, and next development.
The defendants asking for that clearance are not one law firm answering one carrier. Herbert S. Subin and Eric Subin are named, tied to Subin Associates and pleaded for their roles running it. Arnold Baum is named alongside them. Sitting beside them as a defendant, not a witness, is Gregory Elefterakis, the litigation funder behind Case Cash Funding. Plaintiffs' theory pleads the firm and its funder as parts of one enterprise, the same plaintiff-firm-plus-funder RICO shape now recurring across this carrier docket sheet. None of the sixteen motions has been decided. None of the underlying allegations has been tested at trial. Every name above is a defendant answering a complaint, not a proven wrongdoer.
The tactical picture is arithmetic. Sixteen dispositive motions in one case means sixteen separate legal theories the plaintiffs have to survive before discovery opens, and it means sixteen separate chances for the magistrate to trim the enterprise theory defendant by defendant. The joint letter that opened this scene, answering a notice of additional authority, is itself a preview of that fight. The parties are already sparring over which appellate rulings should apply, before a single motion has been decided. Cross-Goldenberg's order resolves none of that argument. It only refuses to let discovery run in parallel with it.
The next legal choice belongs to the court, not the parties. Sixteen motions to dismiss now have to be briefed through to a ruling, and only then does a scheduling order become possible. No ruling date sits on the public docket. A case that started in May 2025 crosses into its second full year still deciding who stays in it. Every one of those sixteen rulings will land before the first document request goes out.
Subin Associates, last seen in this series in SUBIN IV, the January 2026 RICO complaint filed against the firm as it wound itself down, now answers a different fight in the earlier-filed case that will test the same book of business first. Gregory Elefterakis, last seen as a named defendant in New York Marine & General Ins. Co. v. Case Cash Funding, the funder-only suit filed in the Southern District in June, now sits inside SUBIN III itself, the plaintiff-firm and its funder sued side by side in one Brooklyn federal docket. Sixteen motions stand between that theory and a jury. The scoreboard reads pending. It has read pending for fourteen months, and it will keep reading pending until a magistrate judge clears the pile in front of her.
The Executive Briefing is five questions. It shows you exactly where the gaps are.
Take the Executive Briefing →Free weekly intelligence for executives responsible for litigation exposure: the named decision-makers, dollar exposure, operating consequence, and next development.