DLA Piper, which is defending Qatar-based Al Jazeera television network against a federal defamation lawsuit filed by two major league baseball players, accidentally released to opposing counsel at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan documents that it has since claimed should be returned because they are covered by attorney-client privilege.

Earlier this month a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered Al Jazeera to provide a privilege log that identifies each of the “inadvertently disclosed” documents, so that the network's privilege claims can be assessed.

Michael Hynes, a partner in the New York office of DLA Piper who represents Al Jazeera, said his client had complied with the order. Asked about the current status of the issue, Hynes said: “I'm not going to discuss what the court has done.”

Meanwhile, in an unrelated April 20 motion, Quinn Emanuel asked the court to compel the television network and its subsidiaries to release more documents as part of discovery. In the motion, the ballplayers reiterate their claims that Al Jazeera libeled them and invaded their privacy in a 2015 documentary suggesting the athletes took performance drugs.

The ballplayers—Washington Nationals' first baseman Ryan Zimmerman and former Philadelphia Phillies first baseman and current free agent Ryan Howard—are represented by Quinn Emanuel's William Burck, who declined to comment.

Zimmerman and Howard allege that the network ignored red flags about the documentary's claims' sole source—Charlie Sly, a 31-year-old who was presented as a pharmacist and said he supplied performance-enhancing drugs to high-profile athletes. The documentary aired and included Sly's claims, even though Sly recanted prior to its broadcast his scenario, according to the ballplayers' motion.

The pair asked U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to compel Al Jazeera to produce documents about its ratings, its financial investment in the documentary, its organizational charts, its staff members' texts and additional documents about Sly.

Al Jazeera has denied the lawsuit's allegations, arguing in a motion to dismiss that the documentary did not contain actionable defamatory statements about Zimmerman or Howard, because “the pertinent representations are not reasonably capable of conveying a defamatory meaning.”

The network also argued that the ballplayers' complaint fails to plead facts that would support an inference of actual malice, a necessary component, since the athletes qualify as public figures.

In a March 2017 order, however, the judge rejected Al Jazeera's motion to dismiss, concluding that “the complaint that Zimmerman and Howard have filed contains sufficient allegations to state defamation and false light claims.”

Last month, lawyers at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher also traded motions with Al Jazeera in the case, though the nature of that dispute is not public because the briefs were filed under seal. The American Lawyer reported in 2015 that former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning had hired Gibson Dunn's Theodore Olson in the wake of the Al Jazeera report, which included an allegation that Manning had obtained human growth hormone after a potentially career-ending neck injury.

Chantale Fiebig, a partner in the D.C. office of Gibson Dunn who filed the sealed motion, declined to comment for this story.