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and sell stock, primarily in offshore accounts, working out of an office in his northern Toronto home. And it worked mag- nificently; the two men raked in nearly $10 million, making it by far the biggest insider case in Canadian history and one of the largest in North America. "If you look at Martha Stewart — hers was only a $45,000 insider-trading case," points out Kevin Harrison, the lawyer and superintendent in charge of the RCMP's Integrated Market Enforcement Team in Toronto, who investigated Cornblum and Grmovsek. "This one is alleging $10 million in profits. So it's fairly significant in size." But later the pair grew reckless with their trading, and in April 2008 the scheme was uncovered by American authorities. This past October, days before they were to appear in court to plead guilty, Cornblum jumped to his death off the bridge in Toronto. His wife, Marilyn, told The Globe and Mail her husband's suicide was the "culmination of a lifelong battle with severe depression." Grmovsek, 40, called it a "tragedy," espe- cially in light of the fact Cornblum would have spent barely a handful of months behind bars. This winter, Grmovsek was sentenced to 39 months in jail and ordered to pay $1.1 million in penalties to the Ontario Securities Commission — although he'll be out of prison this year. In one respect, the arrests of Grmovsek and Cornblum are a fin de siècle moment, coming as they did in the midst of the Great Recession that was triggered by the devil-may-care behav- iour of investment bankers selling rotten financial products. In fact, no one should be surprised that, alongside bankers and traders, some corporate lawyers stand accused of engaging in related white-collar shenanigans. Just look at Marc Dreier, a hotshot New York litigator who ran a 270-lawyer Park Avenue firm, Dreier LLP. Last year, Dreier was sentenced to 20 years in prison for stealing US$380 million from a bunch of hedge funds. He was arrested in Toronto in late 2008 under bizarre circum- stances, having attempted to impersonate a Canadian pension- fund lawyer as part of a scheme to sell bogus securities. Drier decided to rob his clients' money simply because he wanted to be a success story. Indeed, with his stolen loot he accrued two waterfront homes in the Hamptons, condominiums in the Caribbean, a 120-foot yacht moored in St. Martin, a $200,000 Aston Martin, an oceanside condominium in Santa Monica, his own Los Angeles sushi restaurant, plus a collection of modern art that included works by David Hockney and Pablo Picasso. Other cases have also come to light. Last year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged a pair of lawyers, along with six Wall Street traders, for tipping inside information in exchange for kickbacks as part of a US$20-million insider- trading scheme. One of the accused attorneys, Arthur J. Cutillo, worked for Ropes & Gray LLP, an old and storied Boston-based international law firm. In 2007, husband and wife lawyers Christopher and Randi Collotta were charged along with 11 Wall Street brokers and traders for being involved in a US$14-million insider-trading scheme. "We have clearly seen a number of law- yers charged with breaking security laws or who're under inves- tigation, probably as a byproduct of the entire sub-prime crisis," maintains Steven Caruso, a partner with the New York law firm Maddox Hargett & Caruso PC, which specializes in suing Wall Street banks over investment fraud. "I sense greed was one factor in what we are now seeing." This is echoed by Linda Chatman Thomsen, the SEC's former director of enforcement, who said in a speech last year that she found it "depressing" and "inexpli- cable" that nine American lawyers had been sued by the regulator for trading in stocks ahead of significant news. Y ET THE ISSUE of corporate lawyers behaving badly is far more nuanced than one might expect. For starters, you have to draw a distinction between an insider-trading scheme or stealing from a client's trust fund, and corporate law- yers simply making poor judgment calls that end up scarring their reputations and costing their firms scads of money. In Canada, this latter type of cock-up seems more commonplace, and is far more interesting, at least according to Philip Slayton, a former Bay Street lawyer, Canadian Lawyer columnist, and author of the book Lawyers Gone Bad. "What's going to move a young ambitious Bay Street lawyer's career along is bringing in clients and billing lots of money and adding to the coffers of his firm," observes Slayton. "What's not going to make his career is being a moral beacon. It's a business. 'It's a business stupid' should be engraved on the portico of these law firms. So it would be very unusual for a lawyer to say, 'You know what, I don't think you should do that.'" Canadian corporate lawyers are not immune to scandal. There was immigration lawyer Martin Pilzmaker hired at Lang 32 M ARCH 2010 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com ntitled-4 1 2/10/10 10:02:59 AM