Judge: Lawyer made false comments

Retired attorney said former colleagues were extortionists.

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 Tuesday.

Wood’s 2021 public posts on the Telegram app about his former colleagues came as he was under investigation by the State Bar of Georgia, in part due to his behavior toward 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 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 clients included Centennial Olympic Park hero Richard Jewell, or his lawyers did not immediately respond to questions about the ruling.