 In March 2019, attorneys for the Hussains filed their answer to the Rivenburgs' lawsuit.They asserted a range of affirmative defenses, such as that the plaintiffs contributed to their own deaths by failing to wear the seatbelts in the limousine, and that the crash as a whole was an act of God for which their clients could not be held liable.An attorney for the Rivenburgs characterized the defense as "boilerplate", suggesting that the Hussains' attorneys chose to raise an array of standard defenses without settling on one or two that might be best suited to the instant case.