Plaintiffs lawyer Andy Birchfield fired back against Johnson & Johnson on Tuesday, calling its motion to disqualify him and his firm, Beasley Allen, from the talc multidistrict litigation the “latest example in a long line of smear tactics.”

“Practicing law is a profession, not a locker-room brawl,” wrote Birchfield’s attorney, Jeffrey Pollock, a partner at Fox Rothschild in Princeton, New Jersey, in a response to the disqualification motion, which he called “an impermissible tactic to intimidate plaintiffs” and the “latest example in a long line of smear tactics where J&J has levied personal attacks on lawyers, doctors, experts, and plaintiffs to deflect from their own misconduct.”