One man gathers what another man spills

You never know where your next big break will come from. It might come as divine inspiration, you may trip over it on the ground or it might just get filtered out as spam mail into your inbox.

Recently, a lawyer at the firm Pepper Hamilton incorrectly addressed a very confidential e-mail to New York Times reporter Alex Berenson - and then sent it (the mail was intended for a Pepper Hamilton colleague also named Berenson).

The interesting part is that Pepper Hamilton is representing drug company Eli Lilly in a very large class action lawsuit, and Berenson just happens to be an investigative reporter writing stories on evil-doing pharmaceutical companies, including extensive reporting on Eli Lilly.

The e-mail divulged secret meetings being held to consider a settlement that could be as large as USD 1 billion.

It doesn’t get any better than this for a journalist. It doesn’t get any worse than this for a fast-clicking law executive. You can read the NYT article here. And thanks to NPR’s On the Media for this story; it wasn’t in my spam box however.

/David