Tesla on Monday urged a judge not to award billions of dollars in shares to the lawyers who successfully challenged Elon Musk’s record pay package, painting them as freeriding opportunists attempting to cash in on the CEO’s hard-fought successes.

“It’s a real-life lawyer joke,” John Reed, a partner at DLA Piper, who represents Tesla, told Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick during the day-long hearing in the Delaware Court of Chancery. An expert witness for Tesla described the fee request as an “unjustifiable windfall”.

The hearing was the first in-court gathering of the parties since a June vote in which 72 per cent of Tesla’s shareholders, excluding Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal, overwhelmingly approved the same pay package terms that McCormick rejected in January. Tesla has said that vote is grounds for McCormick to reverse her previous decision.