online review defense

Served With a Defamation Cease-and-Desist? Why Illinois Law and the First Amendment Often Protect What You Said

June 17, 2026 | Peter S. Lubin and James V. DiTommaso

The cease-and-desist letter gives you ten days. You wrote a review, or warned a customer, or told an unflattering truth about a former vendor in a way that cost him a sale, and now his lawyer calls it defamation. The letter demands that you retract the statement, take down the post, and apologize, or face a lawsuit seeking damages it sets in the six figures. It is printed on heavy letterhead and written to make you reach for the delete key before you reach for a lawyer. The threat is designed to make silence look like the cheapest path.

Before you take anything down, understand what Illinois law actually protects, because a great many of these letters demand the retraction of speech that no court could ever call defamatory. A defamation claim is far harder to win than the letter lets on, the First Amendment and the Illinois Constitution protect opinion and truth at the threshold, and Illinois has an anti-SLAPP statute, strengthened in 2025, that can turn a bullying lawsuit into a bill the sender has to pay. The letter is the opening move in a negotiation, not the verdict it pretends to be.

A defamation claim in Illinois, as the Supreme Court set out in Solaia Technology v. Specialty Publishing Company, requires a false statement of fact about the plaintiff, an unprivileged publication of that statement to someone else, and resulting damage. The words that decide most cases are “false” and “of fact.” Opinion is not defamation, truth is not defamation, and a statement the law treats as privileged is not defamation, no matter how much it stung.

Sued for Defamation in Illinois? The Defenses That Can End the Case Before It Gains Momentum

May 24, 2026 | Peter S. Lubin and James V. DiTommaso

The summons rarely feels proportional to what happened. You left an honest review of a contractor. You warned a colleague about a vendor who had burned you. You answered a reporter’s question, or posted what you believed was true, or simply repeated what half the industry already knew. Now a process server is at the door and a complaint accuses you of defamation, demands a sum with a lot of zeros, and frames your words as if they were a calculated act of malice. The plaintiff is betting that the cost and fear of litigation will make you apologize, retract, and pay before anyone tests whether the claim is any good.

Often the claim is not good. Illinois defamation law is far more demanding of plaintiffs than most people sued under it realize, and several of its defenses are designed to end a weak case early, before it drains a year of your life. We tell clients the truth in both directions. A genuinely false and damaging statement of fact can cost you. But a great many defamation suits are built on opinion, on substantially true statements, on words that carry an innocent meaning, or on a theory that runs out of time. Knowing which is which is the whole game.

Begin with what the plaintiff must prove. A defamation claim in Illinois requires a false statement of fact about the plaintiff, an unprivileged publication of that statement to a third party, some level of fault, and damage to the plaintiff’s reputation. Each element is a place where a case can fail. The requirement that the statement be one of fact, and false, is the one defendants underuse. Continue reading ›

Social-Media Accusations, and Defamation or Business Control Lawsuits in the Social Media Age

November 15, 2025 | Peter S. Lubin and James V. DiTommaso

The New Reality: Accusations Before Investigation

In the modern environment, a single social-media post can trigger a storm of attention, formal investigations, and sometimes a lawsuit. We have dealt with this type of situtation in many of our lible and business control cases.

Our firm represents pleaintiffs and defendants in these highly chargds cases that sit at the intersection of social causes and modern defamation or business control law.

Discovery Battles Over PR Firm Documents

A major battleground in these case can be obtaining through discovery outside public relations firm documents and communciations when the opposing side has relied on such a firm. Those documents can matter if for instance they show whether the lawsuit is a genuine attempt to vindicate a reputation—or part of a broader public-relations campaign and lawfare as opposed to legitimate libel or business control suit

Illinois law treats discovery as broadly relevant if it has any tendency to make a fact in issue more or less probable. A 2019 appellate decision reported at 2019 IL App (1st) 182354, ¶ 35, and another at 2017 IL App (1st) 161918, ¶ 14, emphasize that discovery is not limited to what will be admissible at trial, but also includes what may lead to admissible evidence. That principle supports our effort to obtain communications with the public relations firm that helped craft talking points, draft emails to classmates, and shape threats to witnesses.

Courts have also recognized that public-relations work is generally not protected as attorney work product, even if it touches on litigation strategy. Decisions reported at 265 Ill. App. 3d 654 (1st Dist. 1994), 329 F.R.D. 628 (N.D. Cal. 2019), and 290 F.R.D. 421 (S.D.N.Y. 2013) hold that communications with outside consultants like publicists are ordinarily discoverable. We rely on that authority to argue that the PR firm documents must be produced.

Defamation in the Age of Anonymous Accounts

Because the original accusations in some of cases were posted through social-media accounts that sometimes hid the poster’s identity, we also deal with the cutting edge of online defamation. We regularly work with subpoenas to platforms such as Yelp, Google and SnapChat, IP and device information, and cross-referencing of screenshots, deletion logs, and metadata to tie anonymous statements back to real people.

Our role is not to silence legitimate speech about misconduct, but to defend people who tell the truth and to prosecute peole who libel our clients.

What Sets Our Firm Apart in Defamation Work and Business Dispute Work

Our lawyers have handled complex libel and business control suits that blend:

High-profile media coverage, social-media and PR campaigns;
Aggressive discovery disputes over expert witnesses, PR firms, and internal investigations.

Because we routinely litigate both defamation and business torts, we are comfortable with large-scale document collections, forensic email and text discovery, and cross-border issues when the parties and witnesses are in different states. Continue reading ›