The founding partner of the new law firm Kyle Roche was said to have started frivolous class-action lawsuits to hurt Avalanche’s competitors.
Kyle Roche is a crypto lawyer and the founding partner of the law firm Roche Freedman. On Wednesday, he filed to withdraw as counsel in several high-profile crypto class-action lawsuits after a whistleblower site said he had attacked crypto companies in a “gangster-style” way.
Court records show that Roche has asked to stop representing Tether, Bitfinex, the Tron Foundation, and HDR Global Trading in cases against them (which operates as BitMEX).
All of the cases involve people who want to file class-action lawsuits against the named crypto companies, claiming that they ripped off retail customers.
Just days before the withdrawal, a series of videos posted on the whistleblower website Crypto Leaks seemed to show Roche bragging about how he used the law to get sensitive information about crypto companies. On the videos, Roche also seemed to say things like “10 idiots” and “100,000 idiots” about jurors and people who filed class-action lawsuits.
Roche said in a statement that the videos were “illegally obtained, highly edited video clips that don’t show the full story.”
Roche was once hired by Ava Labs, the company that created the Avalanche blockchain. In the Crypto Leaks report, Roche is also said to have filed frivolous lawsuits against Avalanche’s competitors.
Kyle Roche and Emin Gün Sirer, who started Ava Labs, have both said that the claims are false. We asked Kyle Roche, Roche Freeman, and a representative from Ava Labs for their thoughts on Wednesday, but they didn’t answer right away.
In a motion filed on Wednesday, Roche said he would “withdraw as one of the attorneys for the Proposed Class” and “is no longer involved” in his firm’s class action practice.
Roche hasn’t asked to quit as an attorney for other class actions against Nexo, Dfinity, BAM Trading (the company that runs Binance.US), Solana Labs, the Celsius Network bankruptcy case, or Block.one.
Court records show that Roche also still represents Emin Gün Sirer directly in a few legal cases.
But it looks like the class-action lawsuits haven’t been completely dropped. It’s likely that they will go on with the law firm Roche Freedman in charge, but without its name partner.
