Like lots of lawyers, I write dozens of lawyer letters every year. They tend to have an audience of one: An attorney who writes to the paper unhappy with something we have done. I write back, and more often than not, nothing more is ever heard. We take no offense. We’re lawyers, not novelists.

I knew of course that this one would be different. The Trump campaign had distributed the threat letter on the internet overnight; the morning news shows were leading with it. What I didn’t know was just how different it would be.

By Friday night, more than a million people would come to The Times’s website to read the response I ended up writing. On Saturday, two days after the letter went public, it still topped the “most emailed” and “most viewed” list on nytimes.com.

I wrote the letter in about 45 minutes on Thursday morning, between a meeting on the company’s emergency operations plan and a conference call about a new patent suit we have in Texas. (Is somebody really claiming to have invented a method for switching from watching one video to watching another?) Three of my colleagues from the Legal Department — Ken Richieri, Diane Brayton and Ian MacDougall — then came by to go over the draft.

We went around for about 30 minutes, talking about whether the overall point and tone were right, whether words should be tweaked, whether the ending was right. I went online to double-check quotes. We tried to gauge the likely public reaction. In the end, we convinced ourselves to make a few minor tweaks but to stick with the original draft.