Toronto Abuzz About Partner Fired From Local Dorsey & Whitney Office

Legal Ethics

Toronto Abuzz About Partner Fired From Local Dorsey & Whitney Office

Posted May 14, 2008, 11:39 am CDT
By Martha Neil

Lawyers from Dorsey & Whitney will be scrambling to try to make up lost ground as the firm copes with an embarrassing situation in its small Toronto office, a Canadian publication predicts.

The city's legal community is still buzzing over Gil Cornblum, a partner fired by the firm last week after allegations implicating him as an information conduit in a claimed insider trading scheme involving the stock of several companies advised by Dorsey & Whitney, reports the Financial Post. It predicts that the situation could lead the 650-attorney Minneapolis-based firm to close the Toronto office, although Dorsey & Whitney says it has no plans to do so.

"It’s a devastating allegation for a transactional law firm to deal with," the Post writes. "Lawyers who take money from clients is one thing and many big law firms have survived that type of crisis. However, client confidentiality is sacrosanct in the M&A world and it’s unheard of for a law firm in Canada to get embroiled in such allegations and rare to do so in the United States."

Earlier coverage:

ABAJournal.com: "Dorsey & Whitney Fires Partner as Insider Trading Probe Continues"

ABAJournal.com: "Suspect in Insider Trading Probe Had ‘Connection’ to Lawyer"

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Posted by Steve S - 3 months, 2 weeks, 6 days, 14 hours, 10 minutes ago

Wow. You would think D&W would have instilled more fear into their personnel, after having been down this road before. One of the landmark insider trading cases, which established the “misappropriation theory” of insider trading, featured a D&W partner doing the same thing out of the Minneapolis office:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/96-842.ZO.html

In law school I wrote about, and moot-courted about, the O’Hagan case, so when I saw this the bell immediately went off that a D&W lawyer was at the center of that one also.

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