People walk by a Wall Street sign close to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., April 2, 2018. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

(Reuters) - A former clerk at the Wall Street law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett was sentenced on Wednesday to 37 months in prison for his role in an insider trading ring that passed merger tips on napkins and Post-it notes in New York’s Grand Central Terminal.

Steven Metro, 44, formerly of Katonah, New York, was resentenced three months after the federal appeals court in Philadelphia threw out his original 46-month term, finding a lack of proof he was responsible for all $5.6 million of alleged illegal profit from the five-year scheme.

Prosecutors said Metro leaked transactions involving Simpson Thacher clients to mortgage broker Frank Tamayo, who passed the tips to former Morgan Stanley MS.N stockbroker Vladimir Eydelman at Grand Central's main clock.

Tamayo would then chew up the papers on which tips were written, prosecutors said.

U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp in Trenton, New Jersey, who imposed the sentence, also ordered Metro to serve three years of supervised release.

Metro has been incarcerated in a federal detention center in Philadelphia, and according to his lawyer, Lawrence Lustberg, is expected to move to a halfway house within a month.

“As he expressed to the court today, his imprisonment has given him the chance to re-order his priorities and he has learned - as he said, ‘the hard way’ - that family is much more important than money,” Lustberg said in an email.

Metro pleaded guilty in November 2015. Eydelman and Tamayo also pleaded guilty and were sentenced to three years and one year in prison, respectively.

Shipp had also imposed the original 46-month prison term. Prosecutors agreed that a 37-month term was now appropriate.