COMES NOW Troll Abuse Mark to heap contumely on a misbeggoten motion
To wit:
It is not entirely clear from the source link whether this motion, which seeks "attorney's fees for frivolous pleading," was actual filed by the defendant.
Assuming for the sake of argument that it was, absent a mole in Leiser's (the plaintiffs' attorney) office feeding information to the defendant,* or the defendant having hacked into the Leiser computer system,* there is no possible factual basis for the assertion in paragraph 2, which rests upon the hypothetical existence of emails that the defendant cannot possibly have had access to, and thus cannot even know exist, except as a matter of pure speculation.
*
Both of these things would require a gross violation of law; thus, to the extent defendant may have such evidence, defendant would risk criminal prosecution by submitting it to the court.
An allegation or claim based on pure speculation is
not a good-faith basis for a pleading.
As the Va. Supreme Court explained in
Benitez, although the rule can be somewhat flexible depending on the circumstances, purely speculative, non-evidence-based pleading does not satisfy Section 8.01-271's due diligence standard:
A pleading that puts the opposing party to the burden of preparing to meet claims and defenses the pleader knows to have no basis in fact is oppressive. It constitutes an abuse of the pleading process and results in the wrong that Section 8.01-271.1 was enacted to prevent.
Further, any discovery relating to proof of the paragraph 2 allegation - and there is no basis for discovery to proceed, given the entirely speculative nature of the claim - would necessarily rest on the extraordinary and rare requirement of a court ordering the piercing or abrogation of the attorney-client privilege. Which only occurs where there is evidence of a fraud on the court -- not mere fraud, mind you, but
fraud on the court ; and not merely an
allegation of such fraud, but
evidence thereof.
Here, the only evidence is the plaintiffs' Complaint, which may well be subject, in whole or in part, to a dispositive motion such as a demurrer. But to suggest that the Complaint amounts to a fraud on the court is ludicrous on its face.
Thus at least as to paragraph 2, the defendant's motion is oppressive, and an abuse of the pleading process -- being wholly speculative and with no basis in fact, and resting as it does on the outrageous assumption, advanced without evidence, that plaintiffs and/or their attorney have perpetrated a fraud on the court.
As such, this motion for sanctions is itself a sanctionable pleading under Section 8.01-271.1.
How ironic.
Or sad.
Or amusing, depending on one's point of view.