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CROSS EXAMINED Making life count Montreal lawyer who survived leukemia raised more than $300,000 through a gruelling six-week European bike odyssey. BY KATHRYN LEGER cases for Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP. Each litigation case is another chess game, as he puts it, full of careful deliberations and strategic preparation for an eventual successful assault on the opponent. The approach helped pay off as Brock acted on the winning team from Davies W for BCE Inc. in the landmark Supreme Court of Canada case against Bell Canada bondholders, and for Hollinger Inc. in its action to obtain a freeze order on the international assets of media baron Conrad Black. These days Brock is relishing another victory in one high-stakes battle, one of the rare times he was certain at first he would lose. In June, Brock returned from a six-week cycling odyssey through Europe to mark the passage of his fifth year in remission from leukemia and to raise money for education and research on blood cancers at Montreal's Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont, a teaching hos- pital affiliated with the Université de Montréal. The anniversary of his survival of a disease that has a 70-per-cent mortality rate comes every September. Brock raised more than $300,000 on the ride of almost 3,000 kilometres, bringing the total money raised so far for the fund set up in his name at the hospital to more than $1 million. Thousands of dollars continue to pour in and — pumped to conquer yet a new threshold — he has set his sights on collect- ing at least another $3 million by the time his 10th anniversary of survival rolls around in 2015. The European cycle journey was a "bookend" to months of suffering, imposed reflections on life and death, and the primal fight to survive after he was diagnosed on Sept. 21, 2004 with acute myeloid leu- kemia. His father had been diagnosed with the same virulent strain of leukemia almost one week to the day seven years earlier and only lived six more weeks. "I was sure, sure, sure I was going to die and Oct. 30 [six weeks after diagnosis] was my expiration date, you know, like on a milk carton," recalls Brock. He failed the first trial of chemotherapy, then came a second round, a grim so-called supralethal treatment over 10 days to sterilize his bone marrow so there could be a bone 12 SEPTEMBER 2010 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com (Top) Brock with Paul Balthazard, another Montreal leukemia survivor. (Bottom) Along the way in Germany. illiam Brock is not by nature a gambler, preferring calculation to chance. "I am organized, I am disciplined, and I like to win," declares an unabashed Brock, a Montreal lawyer who works on some of Canada's biggest litigation William Brock and his wife, lawyer Maryse Bertrand.