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The letter only mentions attorney-client privilege with respect to correspondence between the RH lawyers and the author, NOT correspondence between RH executives and the RH lawyers.

Again, I don’t believe any real A/C privilege exists between a publisher’s lawyers and an author. They represent the publisher, not the author, and are working to protect the interests of the publisher.

I surmise that the Palin lawyers mention a waiver of A/C privilege between the author and the RH lawyers simply to preclude that line of attack being used to slow down the process. I would be surprised if a judge at trial would have allowed them to assert an A/C privilege on those communications.

Of course, I’m not a lawyer, and so I don’t know all the nuances of A/C law. I guess there could be some limited privilege a person who didn’t hire a lawyer might claim if they argued they THOUGHT the lawyer was acting on their behalf — and the disclosure of the communication would preclude that argument.

But what seems clear is that this has nothing to do with the A/C privilege between the RH lawyers and the RH executives, which means that there would be no airing of THAT dirty laundry without additional work.

The question is whether the author disclosing that there was an e-mail from the RH lawyers in which they say he needs evidence would in any way open them up at some point to having to disclose limited communication of the same information to their in-house executives. I can’t imagine A/C privilege being broken in that way though.

I think the e-mails between the author and RH could be damaging enough — but I don’t think based on what we know now that there is any breach of A/C privilege within the RH company. And I don’t see how a person not employed by the company, who is in a contract with the company, could possibly effect a breach of the A/C privilege a company has with it’s own lawyers.

Maybe we aren’t really arguing the same thing.

The way I'm reading the letter, Palin's lawyers are trying to head off a potential attorney-client privilege claim by Random House of its lawyer's communications with McGinness, by noting that McGinness--whom I assume was operating under some sort of contract with Random House, which would probably be the basis of any A-C privilege claim by RH--has revealed communications between the RH lawyers and himself to third parties. It is this which "pierces the veil" in legalese.

I ain't a lawyer though, so I'm just guessin' . . .