Retired Atlanta defamation attorney L. Lin Wood made false and defamatory comments about his ex-colleagues with whom he’s in a yearslong battle over client fees, a federal judge has determined.
Wood repeatedly labeled three attorneys who worked in his Atlanta law firm as criminal extortionists, court records show.
Wood encouraged his hundreds of thousands of social media followers to file complaints against the attorneys – Nicole Wade, Jonathan Grunberg and Taylor Wilson – with the State Bar of Georgia, saying they should be disbarred, U.S. District Judge Michael L. Brown noted in an order on Tuesday.
Wood’s 2021 public posts on the Telegram application about his former colleagues came as he was under investigation by the State Bar of Georgia, in part due to his behavior towards them, records show. The state bar agreed to end its investigation of Wood, which also probed his election conspiracy theories, when he gave up his law license in July 2023.
Brown said Wood had also contacted clients and co-counsel of Wade, Grunberg and Wilson and said the trio were extortionists who were threatening to sue him in order to extort money from him.
“Tellingly, (Wood) does not even try to show his accusations were true,” Brown said. “Indeed, he admits (Wade, Grunberg and Wilson) did not commit ‘the crime of extortion.’”
The judge’s ruling gets Wade, Grunberg and Wilson partway to proving that Wood is liable for defamation.
“They will still have to show at trial that the false and defamatory statements were negligently published to third parties,” Drew Beal, an attorney for Wade, Grunberg and Wilson, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Wood, whose high-profile clients have included Centennial Olympic Park hero Richard Jewell, and his lawyers did not immediately respond to questions about the ruling.
It’s not the first time Wood’s public comments about his former colleagues have drawn criticism from a judge.
In June 2023, Wood was held in contempt and fined $5,000 by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee for violating a 2020 court order that barred him from disparaging Wade, Grunberg and Wilson. Wood had challenged the non-disparagement order but it was upheld by the Georgia Court of Appeals in February 2022.
McAfee also made Wood pay his former colleagues more than $42,000 in attorney fees in relation to the contempt finding, and warned Wood that further sanctions would follow if he continued to publicly badmouth Wade, Grunberg and Wilson.
The three lawyers left Wood’s law firm in February 2020, and later said in a lawsuit against him that they did so because of his erratic and threatening behavior toward them. Wade, Grunberg and Wilson have set up their own firm specializing in defamation cases.
Together with Wood, the three attorneys represented several plaintiffs in high-profile cases, including British cave explorer Vernon Unsworth in his libel case against businessman Elon Musk. They also represented Nicholas Sandmann, one of a group of students from a Kentucky high school filmed in an altercation with a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial following an anti-abortion rally.
In their 2020 contract breach case against Wood that remains pending in Fulton County, Wade, Grunberg and Wilson allege in part that Wood refuses to pay them their share of fees after Sandmann settled claims against CNN and other media companies.
Wood and his firm agreed in March 2020 to pay Wade, Grunberg and Wilson more than $640,000 in fees from several cases they worked on together, records show. Shortly before suing Wood and his firm in August 2020, Wade, Grunberg and Wilson offered to settle their grievances against him for $1.25 million.
The settlement offer, which Wood rejected, was mentioned in some of Wood’s public accusations that Wade, Grunberg and Wilson were trying to extort money from him, Brown noted in his order Tuesday.
The judge rejected Wood’s argument that his comments about Wade, Grunberg and Wilson were not false because they contained loose, figurative or hyperbolic language that couldn’t be reasonably construed as a genuine accusation of criminal conduct.
“No reasonable jury could believe his extortion accusations were anything but literal and genuine,” Brown said. “A reasonable jury could only conclude (Wood’s) extortion accusations were false and defamatory.”
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