Attorneys representing Elon Musk have asked a federal judge to dismiss a complaint requesting their removal.
Dogecoin investors had filed a class-action lawsuit against Musk and had demanded that his attorneys be removed for acting improperly.
According to Musk’s lawyers, the said request is nothing more than a waste of time for the court and is also an ‘insult.
The filing
In a biting filing of 17 pages, the lawyers representing the Tesla CEO said that the plaintiffs had alleged the attorneys had been acting out of bounds.
This included the accusation against Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, of leaking a derogatory letter. But, the lawyers said that these were baseless accusations and were not in accordance with the ‘laugh test’.
A legal doctrine, the purpose of a ‘laugh test’ is to consider a claim’s seriousness. Lawyers of Musk asserted that there was nothing funny about the accusations made by Spencer.
They further added that it was he who was behaving inappropriately. The filing said that the allegations made by Spencer were audacious and unfounded.
It said that the ethical improprieties and conflict of interest that had been mentioned by the counsel were so improper that the motion itself was sanctionable.
The motion
Evan Spencer, the lawyer who represents the Dogecoin investors, had filed the motion on June 26th in which the accusations against Musk’s attorneys had been made.
According to Spencer, the lawyers had shown oppressive and deprecating misconduct, specifically Spiro, who had used dirty tactics by leaking a letter on June 15th to the New York Post.
The motion said that this action was an attempt to prejudice the case materially. Spencer had also asked the judge to dismiss Allison Huebert, who is an attorney for Tesla.
He claimed that since she works for Musk and his firm, it creates a conflict of interest. Spencer also demanded that the lawyers be sanctioned financially for their conduct, as they had committed a lot of wrongdoings.
The counter
Of course, the billionaire’s team did not take this sitting down. The legal team first responded to the allegations about the letter published by the New York Post.
They said that these allegations were unsubstantiated and also argued that even if they were true, no ethics rules had been breached.
As far as Huebert working for Tesla is concerned, they argued that as per the law in New York, lawyers can represent executives as well as their companies simultaneously.
Therefore, there was no conflict of interest and said that this was something imaginative that Spencer had cooked up in his head.
The legal battle between the Dogecoin investors and the richest man in the world is worth $258 billion and it kicked off last June.
The meme token investors have alleged that Musk was involved in a racketeering scheme for backing the cryptocurrency.
Musk has been tweeting about DOGE for years now and has also worked with the founders of the token in the past. But, the billionaire denied the allegations made against him.