Rule 11-511 Waiver of privilege by voluntary disclosure.

If you have the right to keep certain information private, like conversations with your lawyer or doctor, you can lose that right by talking about it openly. Once you share a meaningful part of that private conversation with someone outside the protected relationship, you give up your ability to keep the rest of it secret too. Courts see this as a fair trade: you can't reveal parts of a private conversation when it helps you, then block the other side from learning more when it doesn't.

There's an important exception, though. If you share the information with someone else who is also covered by a privilege, like telling your spouse what you discussed with your attorney, you don't automatically lose your protection. The rule only kicks in when you disclose information to someone who isn't bound by any privilege, essentially making the information public or accessible to outsiders.

In practice, this means people need to be careful about who they talk to about confidential matters. If you tell a friend, post on social media, or mention it during a casual conversation, you may lose the legal protection that would have kept that information out of court. The safest approach is to keep private communications truly private until you've talked to your lawyer about how sharing information might affect your case.