Sometimes just to delay (which I never got the point of...unless they aren't ready to go to trial, but then you just tell the judge that).

Delaying a lawsuit - stretching out the time between the filing of the claim and the actual trial - is often very beneficial for defendants.

Part of that is that plaintiffs/prosecutors have the burden of proof - and the more time passes, the harder it is to prove the elements of a claim. Records get lost. Witnesses forget things. People move away or get sick or even die. It's just harder to prove that something happened three years after the fact than three months.

Part of that is that civil plaintiffs are (typically) trying to get monetary damages, which creates incentives to delay. Trivially, the longer between a claim and having to pay it is more time that the defendant gets to have access to the money. Alex Jones (for example) got many more years being a rich person instead of a poor person because it took so long to get the claim adjudicated. And in most run-of-the-mill lawsuits, the burdens of litigation expenses and the time value of money encourage better settlements if the plaintiffs are looking at a long delay between claim and recovery.

Finally, for most defendants, having more time between claim/charge and judgment/sentencing gives them time to mitigate the damage to their lives - to "get their affairs in order," as it were. If you have to serve a two-year stretch, you'd (usually) rather have a few years to prepare for that to happen rather than have it land on you immediately. If a plaintiff is seeking injunctive relief rather than damages (ie. an order for the defendant to do something or stop doing something, rather than money), you get more time to keep doing (or not doing) the thing - or to phase into making the change the plaintiff will force you to make.

So defense lawyers always try to drown the plaintiffs in delays. It almost always helps the defense.