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Stanko Grmovsek and Gil Cornblum's insider-trading scheme was a rare but high-profile example of how greed can override good sense and the law (not to mention professional conduct rules) but a number of corporate lawyers have landed in hot water, some by design, others simply by folly. PTATION BITES WHEN another nearly every day, even lived together for a time, with Cornblum being the best man at Grmovsek's wedding. Cornblum found Grmovsek "interesting and amusing and loud and brash," while Grmovsek thought Cornblum was "very quiet" with a dry sense of humour. S Tragically, their friendship also spawned an insider-trading scheme — a plan that germinated while Grmovsek was a summer student at Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP in 1993. It was an idle remark from another student sporting a pair of white driving shoes that started things off. The student told Grmovsek the spiffy footwear was due to buy- ing a car "with the money he made from a deal he was working on" — whereby it soon dawned on Grmovsek that some articling students were trading stock based on inside information they gleaned from law firms' corporate files. Grmovsek and Cornblum decided to copy this method and for eight years, dur- ing two different stretches of time, ran a very clever get-rich scheme. As Cornblum became a successful corporate lawyer — becoming a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada and New York State Bar; moving from one big law firm to another in both Canada and the United States; eventually landing a partnership with Dorsey & Whitney LLP, a Minneapolis-based global business law firm — he fed inside infor- mation from his firms' files to Grmovsek. He, in turn, used the information to buy www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com M ARCH 2010 31 By Bruce Livesey ometime prior to 7 a.m. on Oct. 26, 2009, a man stood on a road bridge overlooking the Don Valley in east-end downtown Toronto. Apparently wracked with despair and shame, he climbed up and over and leapt into oblivion. The 39-year-old lawyer died in the gravel down below, leaving a slew of unanswered questions in his wake. The origins of this suicide go back nearly 20 years, when Stanko Grmovsek and Gil Cornblum met during their first week at Osgoode Hall Law School in 1990. They quickly became friends, spoke to one