Location: Georgia - we want to ask our roommate to leave when the joint lease renews. Is there any legal action they could take if we do and they don't want to leave?

Location: Georgia

vCheers all. We're in the US, state of Georgia. I live with 2 roommates in a house where we're all on the lease together to a private landlord. The lease is renewed and resigned each year.

One roommate and I have lived together for a few years now and typically the third person has rotated out each year for various reasons. We want to ask our current roommate to leave / not be on the lease when it renews in May. Our landlord historically prefers that the tenants collectively figure things out rather than deal with us individually, so we would:

- talk to the roommate 4-5 months in advance and let them know we plan to renew the lease without them

- let the landlord know we'll be renewing the lease without roommate #3 / will provide another person to take their spot

Tenant laws have always confused me, so we mostly want to know if there's anything about this that could result in some sort of legal response from the other roommate. Obviously they could reach out to the landlord and muddy things by saying they also don't want to leave, but that would almost certainly just result in the landlord either dropping all of us (not ideal, admittedly) or siding with myself and the other roommate because we've been tenants with him for a number of years.

So, barring that, mostly just worried there's some catch legally we may run into if we don't want to renew with that person but they don't want to leave.

Many thanks for any insight <3