Movahed Rakocevic v. Koutsoudakis & Iakovou Law Group, PLLC

Background

Shirin Movahed Rakocevic brought the case without a lawyer and alleged claims for defamation, defamation per se, infringement, and tortious interference with prospective economic advantage against Koutsoudakis & Iakovou Law Group, PLLC, and Andreas Koutsoudakis. She is now represented by counsel. The defendants moved to dismiss the First Amended Complaint under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), which tests whether a complaint states a legally sufficient claim.

The allegations concerned statements Koutsoudakis allegedly made to Jaclyn Milford and to Rakocevic’s clients. Among other things, Rakocevic alleged that Koutsoudakis told Nikolaos Travlos that she had defrauded Milford of a multi-million-dollar company by adding herself as a director and taking over the company, and that she might prepare resolutions to seize unauthorized control of Travlos’s business.

Rulings on the claims

The court stated that the motion was granted in part and denied in part.

The court dismissed the defamation claim in Count I because it duplicated the defamation-per-se claim in Count II. The court dismissed claims based on Koutsoudakis’s December 2022 email to Milford and his statement to Milford that Rakocevic had been terminated from the law firm because those statements were outside New York’s one-year limitations period for defamation claims. The court also dismissed claims based on statements allegedly made to unidentified clients because the complaint did not identify specifically who made which statements, when they were made, or to whom. Claims against the law firm were dismissed because the complaint did not allege facts supporting the firm’s responsibility for Koutsoudakis’s statements.

The court allowed part of the defamation-per-se claim to proceed against Koutsoudakis. It held that the allegations about his statements to Travlos plausibly supported claims based on the assertion that Rakocevic had defrauded Milford and taken over her company, and the assertion that she might draft resolutions to take unauthorized control of Travlos’s business. The court treated the warning that Travlos should be concerned about Rakocevic handling his corporate matters as a nonactionable opinion. It also concluded that the attorney litigation privilege did not apply because the statements to Travlos were not alleged to have been made in connection with a court proceeding.

The court dismissed the tortious-interference claim. It found that the allegations did not show a business relationship with Milford when Koutsoudakis spoke with her, and that communications involving Travlos and Kayce White were at least partly motivated by the defendants’ interest in obtaining or retaining clients. The complaint also did not support an inference that the defendants acted solely out of malice.

The court deemed the infringement claim abandoned because Rakocevic’s opposition did not address the defendants’ arguments for dismissing it.

Amendment and final disposition

The court said Rakocevic may seek permission to file a proposed Second Amended Complaint addressing only Count II, the defamation-per-se claim. It said repleading the other counts would be futile. Any proposed amendment was due as an attachment to a letter explaining how it addressed the identified deficiencies, no later than February 14, 2025.

Judge Schofield ordered that the defendants’ motion be denied in part and granted in part, dismissed the law firm as a defendant, and dismissed all claims except the specified defamation-per-se allegations against Koutsoudakis. The opinion’s conclusion contains apparent typographical errors in several count labels and assigns the infringement claim a different count number than the body of the opinion; the body consistently identifies defamation as Count I, defamation per se as Count II, infringement as Count III, and tortious interference as Count IV.