As 2015 comes to a close, I am pleased to announce that our law firm (The Harris Firm, P.C. in Dallas, Texas) is ending things on a high note. Not only have we had some significant successes this year for our clients, we are wrapping up the year with a virtually unprecedented FINRA arbitration award.
Austin England, one of our attorneys, recently conducted a multi-day arbitration hearing in Los Angeles for one of our California clients, and was successful in achieving an arbitration award of nearly $2,000,000.00. We would like to congratulate Austin for this accomplishment.
As a bit of history, we initiated the claims for our clients in Federal Court in Dallas. We have been successful in the past fighting arbitration clauses in agreements, but in this matter, the defendants obtained a ruling that the case would be determined by a panel of arbitrators.
We generally fight these attempts by defendants because arbitrations fail to provide for jury trials, the rulings are final (only very limited rights to appeal), and, at least with FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority), achieving adequate awards can be a challenge. Nevertheless, Austin embarked in fighting what turned out to be a fairly protracted battle in arbitration (although one party settled prior to the arbitration commencing).
Effectively, the complaint related to a brokerage business in Florida. Over a very short period of time, our clients’ assigned broker and the owner of the firm fulfilled a campaign of not only churning the account with multiple trades, they also inappropriately interchangeably used funds from separate accounts to fund trades, they traded on margin (despite directives that this was disallowed), and, among other things, they forged documents.
Moreover, account statements were falsified to make it appear that their services were successful when, in fact, they lost almost the entirety of the clients’ money. At the hearing, the assigned broker testified against the owner of the brokerage firm, stating that it was the owner who masterminded this plot and who micromanaged the fraudulent scheme.
As I said at the outset, the ruling by the FINRA arbitration panel was virtually unprecedented. Not only was this a seven-figure award, but, significantly, the panel awarded $200,000.00 in exemplary/punitive damages. Congratulations to both Austin England—as well as our clients!
