Yesterday, we wrote how an unnamed Pepper Hamilton lawyer accidentally sent an e-mail containing confidential info to a reporter at The New York Times. The document supposedly had details of a settlement the drugmaker is negotiating with federal and state prosecutors over improper marketing of Zyprexa. The alleged leak, as originally reported by Portfolio, occurred because the reporter, Alex Berenson, has the same last name as another lawyer who was to have received the e-mail, Brad Berenson of Sidley Austin.

However, it appears that Portfolio got it wrong. The Drug and Device Law blog, which first noticed the item yesterday, wrote us to say they ran a correction after speaking with Berenson - the reporter, not the lawyer. So we rang Berenson and he says: “Yes, I did receive a misdirected e-mail from Pepper Hamilton, but it didn’t contain a detailed description of the settlement talks. And yes, I had already known independently about the talks, and I obtained the details I published from sources other than the law firm. The e-mail I received was, essentially, two lines long about a conference call.” However, he acknowledges that the e-mail did confirm, without offering details, that Lilly was in talks with prosecutors.

Robert Heideck, an executive partner at Pepper Hamilton, declined to comment. We left a message with the editor at Portfolio, but have not yet received a reply. For now, the original item still remains on the Portfolio site. As a result, remains unclear whether Portfolio will run a correction or stand by its version of events. UPDATE: A spokeswoman for Portfolio calls us to say the site stands by the item: “The document Mr. Berenson received clearly confirmed settlement talks. In addition, our piece never said it was the sole source of his information.”